Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847) was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. His works include symphonies, concertos, oratorios, piano music and chamber music.
His most-performed works include the Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the Hebrides Overture, the Violin Concerto and the String Octet. After a long period of relative denigration, driven by changing musical tastes and antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his creative originality has been recognised and re-evaluated. He is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.
Mendelssohn was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist. His ten visits there, during which many of his major works were premiered, form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire (now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig), which he founded, became a bastion of that anti-radical outlook.
Compositions by Felix Mendelssohn appear on
A Virtuoso Recital: David Stanhope Piano
This is the third solo CD that David has recorded for Tall Poppies (see also Virtuoso Transcriptions, TP088, and David Stanhope Plays, TP135). The centrepiece is Rachmaninoff's Preludes, Op. 32, which he plays magnificently.