Is it time for Fanny Mendelssohn’s music to become consciously uncoupled from that of her brother? She has always been bound to him as a composer, ever since they agreed that some of Fanny’s songs would be published under Felix’s name, for propriety’s sake – leading to embarrassment for Felix when he met Queen Victoria, and had to admit that he hadn’t in fact written her favourite of “his” songs.
This latest release from the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective offers vibrant performances of two little-known works by the teenage Mendelssohns – Felix’s Piano Sextet and Fanny’s Piano Quartet – alongside the Piano Trio that Fanny completed in the year of her death. The ebullient Sextet has a pair of violas adding mellow sonorities without dimming the brightness. Chi-chi Nwanoku’s double bass acts as a springboard here, and Tom Poster throws off gloriously dextrous piano figuration.
The qualities that make the Sextet so appealing – that filigree lightness in the piano and the translucence of the music generally – make Fanny’s Trio sound initially rather opaque by comparison. Yet stick with the Trio and the balance rights itself. After the dark, tumultuous opening comes a pair of short middle movements with the kind of smiling melancholy that Elgar would do so well half a century later, with violinist Elena Urioste and cellist Laura van der Heijden duetting yearningly. The Quartet is lighter, and in the first movement there are times when it feels like the strings are there just to wind up the piano and watch it go; the middle movement is a gloriously louche barcarolle, the third is nonchalant yet restless, full of changing patterns that gently wrong-foot the listener. Fanny’s chamber music could stand alongside any of this period, not only her brother’s.
This week’s other pick
Colourise, on Orchid Classics, also features Urioste – this time as soloist in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, accompanied by the London Choral Sinfonia. Yes, a choir: Paul Drayton’s 2018 arrangement has the singers accompanying the violin, first wordlessly, then with the text of the poem that inspired the piece. Alongside it there’s the first recording of Lennox Berkeley’s Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons, an imaginative extended anthem looking both back and forwards musically in Brittenesque style. Then there’s a punchy performance of Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite and, perhaps best of all, Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, in a very effective arrangement for strings and piano, movingly sung by Roderick Williams.
