Luogo e data di registrazione		American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (USA) - 26/28 January 1992
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer / Editing		Peter Laenger (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 48 307 - (1 CD) - durata 59' 05" - (p) 1992 - DDD
	Cover Art		Frühlings-stimmung by Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) - Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

It is astonishing that Mendelssohn's Octet was written by a boy of sixteen, not because juvenile compositions are so rare, but achievements of both personal character and artistic technique are so evident in the piece that it would be a great accomplishment for a man of any age. Mozart, even more celebrated for his musical precocity than Mendelssohn, composed at an earlier age, but produced nothing by his teens that bears the stamp of such maturity and originality as this Octet. Moreover, notwithstanding the common prcjudice that early mastery breeds facile and superficial working methods, Mendelssohn was a fastidious reviser of his own works even from the time of the Octet, which he finished in 1825 but waited for seven years to publish. (His more famous “Italian” Symphony never pleased him and remained in manuscript at the time of his death.) Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809 in well-to-do circumstances, but under the somewhat austere parental guidance of his father, Abraham, a wealthy banker whose unenviable fate was to live in the shadow not only of his more illustrious son but of his own famous father, Moses, an acclaimed philosopher. While the family fortune made it possible for the young Felix to conduct his compositions in performances by a small orchestra assembled by his father, his upbringing was strict; and beyond the driven temperament with which his father dominated the Mendelssohns' domestic life, there was the social pressure of anti-semitism that persuaded Abraham to renounce Judaism and adopt Christianity for the security of the family. According to a recent biographer, Eric Werner, this led to a conflict between father and son when Abraham attempted to suppress the Mendelssohn name entirely in favor of the adopted name Bartholdy, to which Felix never consented. Eduard Devrient, writing in 1869, recalled Abraham's “contentious disposition” which became “at last intolerable”. Unlike Werner, however, Devrient attributed this to “physical causes”, and wondered: “Had this excessive irritability anything to do with his sudden death [in 1835], and was it to descend upon Felix?” The year 1825 saw three significant events in the life of the sixteen-year-old Mendelssohn. The first was a trip to Paris during which Abraham introduced his son to the aging and cantankerous Luigi Cherubini, whose favorable judgement of the young musician seems to have surprised almost everyone except perhaps Felix himself, preoccupied as he was with his own disdainful criticism of musicians and musical life in Paris (even comparing Cherubini to “an extinct volcano”). The second was the move in Berlin of the Mendelssohns to their palatial residence in Leipzigerstrasse, the family home until Felix's death at 38 in 1847. The third was the completion in October of the Octet, which he dedicated to his friend and violin teacher, Eduard Rietz (1802-1832). It was Rietz who made the copy of Bach's St. Matthew Passion that was presented to Felix two years earlier and later played such an important part in Mendelssohn's revival of Bach's music. Mendelssohn attached special importance to the scherzo. His sister, Fanny, wrote: “To me alone he told his idea: the whole piece is to be played staccato and pianissímo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and at the same time most insinuating and pleasing, one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession. At the end the first violin takes a flight with a leather-like lightness, and - all has vanished.” The idea is supposed to have originated in these lines from Goethe's Faust describing Walpurgis Night (Pt. 1, l. 4395-98), a subject to which the composer would later return for his great secular oratorio Die erste Walpurgisnacht, inspired by and set to another poem also by Goethe: “Wolkenzug und Nebelflor / Erhellen sich von oben. / Luft im Laub, und Wind im Rohr,/ Und alles ist zerstoben.” (Drifting cloud and gauzy mist / Brighten and dissever. / Breeze on the leaf and wind in the feeds / And all is gone forever. Translation: © 1951 Louis McNiece). The scherzo is the only movement of the Octet that Mendelssohn did not revise for publication. In 1829, he substituted an orchestral arrangement of it for the menuet in a performance of his First Symphony, but this arrangement of the movement was not published until 1911. The orchestral nature of the entire work has often been noted. Louis Spohr wrote in his autobiography: “My four double quartets [...] remain the only ones of their kind. An octet for stringed instruments by Mendelssohn- Bartholdy belongs to quite another kind of art, in which the two quartets do not consort and interchange in double choir, with each other, but all eight instruments work together.” The most important statement on the nature of the instrumentation, however, is by Mendelssohn himself. His advice to the performers appears on the first page of each part: “This octet must be played in the style of a symphony in all parts; the pianos and fortes must be very precisely differentiated and be more sharply accentuated than is ordinarily done in pieces of this type." For those who feel this statement justifies performance of the Octet by a string orchestra, it should be pointed out that the composer would hardly have thought it necessary to advise members of a string orchestra to play “in the style of a symphony”. It remains a unique and original work without precedent, and followed up only by a few subsequent essays of composers willing to risk comparison with its sublime accomplishment. The Danish composer Niels Gade is usually remembered today in connection with Mendelssohn, although Gade's music reveals not only other influences, notably Schumann's, but a personal style that is evident in his earliest surviving works. Nevertheless, Gade's Octet (1848) is the composition in which his debt to a Mendelssohnian model is probably most obvious. The instrumentation and formal plan that his piece shares with Mendelssohn's masterwork make Gade's Octet, even in the absence of a dedication, an homage, yet it is not that of a youthful imitator but of a mature artist with important and highly individual compositions behind him. His Ossian Overture (1840) and his First Symphony (1842) are both works of a strong, lyrical character by a composer who has found his own voice. Gade sent his First Symphony to Mendelssohn after it had been rejected for performance in Leipzig, and its success led to Gade's journey there. Why did Gade compose his Octet? 1848 was a decisive year for him. After his close association with Mendelssohn from 1844 until the latter's death in 1847, he succeeded him as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and might have had a brilliant career in one of Europe`s great musical centers.Yet he wished to build in Copenhagen a musical establishment like the one he had found in Leipzig. Spurred on, no doubt, by the outbreak of the Schleswig-Holstein war between Prussia and Denmark, he returned early in 1848 to Copenhagen where he remained for the rest of his life. Certainly, Mendelssohn'”s influence not only as a composer, but as a cultural statesman of such widely ranging musical interests as education and the working condition of musicians played a major part in Gade”'s own future direction in Copenhagen, where, for the next four decades, he would exert a critical influence on all aspects of Denmark'”s musical life. It is hardly surprising that in the year he undertook to emulate the administrative accomplishments of Mendelssohn's Leipzig period in his homeland, Gade should also set to work on a composition which was to exhibit so thoroughly the virtues of his great mentor. © 1992 Jan Newsom ON THE INSTRUMENTS Washington, D. C. enjoys many cultural advantages as the capital of the United States, among them the largest museum complex (the Smithsonian Institution) and the largest research library (the Library of Congress) in existence, plus an enviable array of art museums, including the National Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In no other city are more Stradivarius instruments housed in publicly accessible institutions than in the District of Columbia. The Corcoran Gallery possesses a fine quartet of Strads, the Smithsonian holds a quintet with two cellos, and the Library of Congress boasts no fewer than six Stradivari instruments. In addition, several Washington residents own Stradivari violins, making the ratio of Strads-to-inhabitants higher in the U. S. capital than in any other city. Washington's selection of Strads is impressive not only in quantity, but in quality as well. Of the roughly 650 Stradivarius instruments that survive from the eight to eleven hundred he is thought to have made during his long and productive life (1644-1737), only thirteen are violas: four of these are housed in Washington. Four of the eleven extant decorated instruments from Stradivari's hand are to be found in Washington. Finally, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian possess two large-model Strad cellos which belong among the small handfull of such instruments which have retained their original size. The core group of instruments heard on this recording is made up of those held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The magnificent Servais cello, donated to the Museum in 1981 by Charlotte Bergen, a wealthy amateur who had acquired the instrument in 1929, has frequently been described as “one of the supreme works of the master”. Built in 1701, it was apparently the last of the large-model bass instruments (bassetti) Stradivari designed before turning, in 1707, to the smaller (and therefore easier to play) model to which he subsequently adhered. Beginning in the 19th century (and lamentably continuing well up to the present day), most of these large cellos were cut down in a Procrustean effort to make them conform to the post-1707 Stradivarian standard. This operation involved removal of a fair amount of wood, shortening the instrument by 3-4 cm. The Servais and its Library of Congress counterpart, the 1697 Castelbarco, are among a select few Stradivarius cellos to survive in their original, uncut grandeur. The unparalleled resonance of the Servais was made justly famous by the Belgian virtuoso Adrien François Servais, who owned the instrument from the late 1840s until his death in 1866. The Greffuhle and Ole Bull violins of the Stradivarius quartet placed on loan to the Smithsonian in 1986 by Dr. Herbert R. Axelrod are decorated with wide perimeter banding of ivory marqueterie lozenges and pastilles, and inlaid foliate designs covering the surfaces of the ribs and the sides and back of the scroll. The viola, rediscovered in 1931 after disappearing from collectors' circles for nearly a century, bears much more subdued decoration limited to an inscribed coat-of-arms now partially hidden by the fingerboard, and a double row of purfling which may date from the time at which this instrument, originally constructed as a large tenore, was reduced to its present size. The Marylebone cello, which predates the Servais, was originally of similarly large dimensions, but was cut down during the course of the 1800s. Comparison of the tone of the deeper-voiced Servais with the tenorlike Marylebone is particularly interesting in the context of the two octets presented here, as the difference makes the two instruments a splendid tandem for carrying out their respective roles. For this recording, the Library of Congress contributed the viola, known as the Medici, which may have been built to provide the third voice in the quintet of instruments Stradivari made for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo Medici III, in 1690. (Its rather larger counterpart, the Tuscan tenor, is to be found in the collection of the Cherubini Institute in Florence.) The Hellier violin, purchased directly from the maker himself by Sir Samuel Hellier in 1734 (and thus one of the few instruments whose provenance is completely documented), was the second ornamented violin made by Stradivari. Like the 1727 violin that completes our octet of instruments, it was made available for use in this project through a private collectoris generosity. All eight instruments were strung for this recording in gut, producing a sound that is richer yet less penetrating than the same instruments yield when adjusted for the higher tension associated with the metal strings in common use since the middle third of the 1900s, and encouraging the performers to explore the outer boundaries of the instruments' dynamic ranges, while using vibrato selectively rather than continuously. The crystalline clarity of the famed Stradivarian tone illuminates the complexities of octet writing particularly well, sharply etching each line of the ingenious and complicated textures. © 1992 Kenneth Slowik