Felix Mendelssohn
Symphonies Nos 3 ‘Scottish’ & 5 ‘Reformation’
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Maxim Emelyanychev
Linn Records CKD667 64:56 mins
Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony, composed to mark the 300th anniversary of Luther’s Augsburg Confession, has generally not had a good press. Following its first performance in 1832 Mendelssohn himself became increasingly dissatisfied with it, and it wasn’t published until some 20 years after his death. It’s true that its scherzo is a bit four-square and unadventurous, but the first movement, with its solemn introduction culminating in the ‘Dresden amen’ phrase (also invoked in Wagner’s Parsifal), followed by an Allegro in Mendelssohn’s most tempestuous vein, is an impressive piece; and the finale – largely based on the Lutheran chorale ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ – finds him revelling in a wind section that has the contrabassoon doubled throughout by a serpent. Most performances make do without that rare and curiously shaped instrument (Mendelssohn also called for it in his Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage overture), but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has rustled one up for this recording – the rich sonority is striking.
Maxim Emelyanychev is a conductor whose music-making exudes spontaneity and flexibility. The slow introduction of the ‘Scottish’ Symphony sounds as hauntingly desolate as it should, and Emelyanychev coaxes some admirably hushed pianissimoplaying out of the clarinet and strings in the main subject of the following Allegro. The movement’s stormy final pages are tremendously impressive, too, while in the finale (whose original tempo marking was ‘Allegro guerriero’) Emelyanychev keeps the rhythm tautly sprung throughout. A pity, though, that he indulges in an accelerando for the symphony’s closing moments, with their new theme in the major. The result piles on the excitement, but at the expense of the music’s rightfully majestic character. Misha Donat
