Classical Review: In First Two Mendelssohn Programs, Van Zweden ...

Mendelssohn was neither Beethoven nor Brahms. Having made this self-evident statement, and noting that he was contemporaneous with former for the first eighteen years of his life, and with the later for the last eighteen years of his life, I?ll also observe that many conductors apparently confuse him with one or the other.

Fortunately, Dallas Symphony music director Jaap van Zweden let Mendelssohn be Mendelssohn throughout the first two programs of the first weekend of a two-weekend festival devoted exclusively to that composer?s music, which continues at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center Thursday evening. However, Van Zweden?s attitude doesn?t necessarily mean playing everything with the same approach, anymore than one would approach all of Beethoven or all of Brahms in the same way.

The two concertos presented in the course of the opening weekend demonstrated this point nicely. The Violin Concerto in E minor in particular demands an awareness that Mendelssohn?s orchestra was leaner and more translucent than our own, and the instruments of his time were in many ways closer to the lightness we associate with historical instruments of the baroque era than those of our own time; at the same time, the rounded lyricism and markedly romantic harmonic idiom requires, to our twenty-first centuries ears, a certain level of richness and depth. Van Zweden and violin soloist Simone Lamsma achieved a fine combination of lightness and substance in their reading.

While the Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, the featured solo work for the second program of the weekend, is by no means the masterpiece that the Violin Concerto is, soloist Alessio Bax and Van Zweden gave, if anything, an equally impressive reading of this engaging work. Particularly in the middle movement, this concerto can deteriorate into a stodgy, four-square drawing room sentimentality. Along with sparkling technique and a wonderful instinctive rubato, Bax made Mendelssohn?s melodies transcend the trap of sentimentality in this work, for a joyful display of early romantic virtuosity.

The weekend also included two items from Mendelssohn?s hit parade, the Hebrides Overture and the ?Scottish? Symphony?both, for better or worse, longstanding music appreciation class favorites, and both inspired by the rugged Scottish landscape. Van Zweden delivered these musical postcards with high romantic ?lan, without a trace of late romantic angst or heaviness.

The opening work of the festival, the expertly crafted String Symphony No. 10 in B minor (written when the composer was 13 years old, and not part of the mature canon of five symphonies) provided an elegant curtain-raiser; on the same concert, in Mendelssohn?s first ?official? full-fledged symphony, No. 1 in C minor (written at the ripe old age of fourteen), the young composer really does seem to be trying to be Beethoven?until the final movement, in which he lavishly demonstrates his unique command of counterpoint, his sense of structure, and his ability to innovate within structure in his own way, inspired by but by no means imitative of Beethoven.

The orchestra generally produced its best rich, clear tone; however, particularly during the Saturday night performance, there were more rough entries and botched cut-offs than one expects from a major orchestra.

Source: http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2011/09/classical-review-in-first-two-mendelssohn-programs-van-zweden-proves-able-interpreter/

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