Sunday Classics preview: Mendelssohn speaks eloquently in simple declarative musical sentences

I guaranteed you last night that even if you don't know anything about classical music, you know at least one piece by the composer of the violin concerto whose slow movement we heard performed by a number of outstanding violinists. And here is that piece: yes, the world's second most famous wedding march, and Mendelssohn's, from his incidental music for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, really is a wedding march -- unlike its even more famous rival. (The Bridal Procession at the start of Act III of Wagner's Lohengrin is exactly that, not a wedding march. Elsa and Lohengrin were already married at the end of Act II; here they're being escorted to the bridal chamber for the, er, main event.) Tomorrow we're going to be hearing more of the MSND incidental music, notably the incandescent Overture.

by Ken

Now to return to our concerto movement. This is of course the central Andante of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64. Here are the performances again, in the same order, this time properly identified:

A. Johanna Martzy (1924-1979)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond.
EMI, recorded June 1954


B. David Oistrakh (1908-1974)

USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin, cond.
Melodiya, recorded 1949


C. Arthur Grumiaux (1921-1986)

New Philharmonia Orchestra, Jan Krenz, cond.
Philips, recorded September 1972


D. Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond.
RCA/BMG, recorded February 1959


E. Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz, cond.
EMI, recorded Apr. 30, 1958


Despite often considerable differences among these performances, the middle three -- by violinists as great as Oistrakh, Grumiaux, and Heifetz -- like just about every other performance I've ever heard, from violinists great and not so great, begin with the assumption that the performer has to start by making this movement "expressive," via some combination of syrupy legato tone, or lush vibrato, or other violinistic devices. I don't know how many times I'd heard the piece -- 100? 200? -- when it suddenly hit me that all those violinists have basically missed the point of this music, which proceeds from its utterly confident simplicity.

As best I recall, the performance that suddenly enabled me to hear this was our E, in the form of a British LP reissue of this 1958 recording by Yehudi Menuhin. And I have to say that as I listened through the clips, a certain amount of the radiance of the music began to reach me via A, Johanna Martzy.

I think it's clear that on some level Arthur Grumiaux and Jascha Heifetz hear this. Note how they're both able, thanks to their amazing bow-arm control, to control the tension of the bow's contact with the strings so that there is no audible tension -- the sound seems simply to float. (I can't begin to tell you how hard this is.) But neither of these magicians can put aside the habit of wanting to make the music "emotional" -- you don't often hear Grumiaux's vibrato throbbing this wildly, while Heifetz injects graffiti-like little curlicues that are not only unnecessary but destructive to the music's remarkable flow.

Of course the ultimate in beautiful tone was rarely among Menuhin's priorities. Boy, does that work in his favor here! By allowing the music to speak in relatively simple declarative musical sentences, he lifts the piece way beyond surface prettiness into the realm of the ethereal. I'll have a few more words to say about this tomorrow.


FINALLY, FOR A BIT OF RAZZLE-DAZZLE . . .

I've talked more than once about pieces of music, starting with Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture, I can listen to over and over and over, on to -- if not beyond -- the limits of human endurance. I couldn't resist throwing in another one here: the finale of Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 25.

Of course to achieve the full lift of which this joyous movement is capable, the performer has to earn it, and for a job like this, there was no one better than Rudolf Serkin, another great artist who placed less than the highest premium on beautiful tone. He was more concerned with firmness and evenness of tone and finely controlled gradations of attack, and compensated in various other ways, including what I can only describe as an intuitive feeling for musical quirkiness, which is about as close as many Germans get to a sense of humor. He made this recording of the concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy on Dec. 19, 1957:



Note how we can feel the principal theme trying to break through before it finally does at 0:47, and ditto with the joyous finger-rippling romp that finally erupts at 1:25 and again at 2:13. If these emergences are really earned, the whole thing can be simply exhilarating.

P.S.: MENDELSSOHN'S STRUCTURAL "INNOVATION"

You may have noticed in our clips of both the finale of the E minor Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto that there's some kind of introductory funny business going on. I thought I might have something to say about this in tomorrow's post, but I didn't. What happened was that Mendelssohn got this idea to "improve" the concerto form by binding all three of its movements musically.

Of course, on occasion composers have found wonderful real links between movements -- the most wonderful, surely, being the way Tchaikovsky got from the slow movement to the finale of his Violin Concerto. It was certainly an interesting thought on Mendelssohn's part, worth pursuing, but I can't say it strengthens the pieces, which stand or fall on the quality of the materials, workmanship, and compatibility of their component movements. Fortunately, the pieces turned out not to be in need of artificial strengthening.

P.P.S.: YES, WE WILL HEAR THE WHOLE VIOLIN CONCERTO

I always meant for you to hear the whole thing, and even after finishing tomorrow's "real" post somehow never got around to it. Never fear, you'll find it as a "bonus" at the end.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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