Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Piano Trios 1 & 2

Album review

It's official: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy has been rehabilitated. During his lifetime, Mendelssohn was considered the supremely skilled and wonderfully expressive epitome of the early Romantic composer. After his early death, however, Mendelssohn was eclipsed by the late Romantic excesses of Wagner, and then banned by the twentieth century genocidal excesses of the Nazis. But in the final years of the twentieth century, Mendelssohn was at last returned to his rightful position in the Romantic pantheon of composers. How can such things be measured? Simple: by the surfeit of recordings of Mendelssohn's music, especially of his chamber music. Arguably his most consistently impressive body of work, Mendelssohn's chamber music exhibits two of his best qualities as a composer: his formal balance and his intense but controlled expressivity. In this 2006 release of Mendelssohn's piano trios, violinist Julia Fischer, cellist Daniel Müller-Schott, and pianist Jonathan Gilad give both works tremendously persuasive performances. Although each young player is a virtuoso with his/her own solo careers, the performances here are amazingly cohesive -- check out the Second Trio's elfin Scherzo -- and obviously affectionate -- check out the First Trio's lyric Andante con moto tranquillo. While many listeners will already have their favorite performances of the trios, listeners who begin exploring Mendelssohn's chamber music with this disc by Fischer, Müller-Schott, and Gilad's piano trios will not go wrong. PenaTone's super audio sound is so transparent it doesn't exist -- only the sound of the instruments exists.

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