Mendelssohn: Octet in E flat major (CD review)

Also, Bruch: Octet in B flat major. Kodaly Quartet, Auer Quartet. Naxos 8.557270.

Like so many musical geniuses, German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809 -1847) was a child prodigy, producing his famous Octet in E flat major, Op. 20, at the age of sixteen. The music is filled with the youthful high spirts we would expect, yet it's also got the captivating magic and maturity so eloquently and zestfully displayed in his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he wrote around the same time in 1825.

Coupled with the Mendelssohn Octet we find the Octet in B flat major by German composer and conductor Max Bruch (1838-1920), a work Bruch composed in the year of his death, 1920. Bruch's music was something of a throwback to the traditional music of the nineteenth century, so it is no surprise that his Octet should owe so much to Mendelssohn's music of almost a hundred years earlier. Both pieces are romantic, flowery, exuberant, flamboyant, lyrical, with moments of serenity and repose amidst dashing élan. It's interesting to note, too, that Bruch's music was pretty much out of fashion by the early twentieth century, yet today it is largely his music and that of other eighteenth and nineteenth-century composers that make up most of the basic repertoire of classical record albums and classical concert programming. Perhaps good tunes never go out of style.

I enjoyed this disc a lot, as played by the combined forces of the renowned Kodaly Quartet and the more-recently formed Auer Quartet. For the paltry price one pays for the Naxos bargain disc, it seems like a bargain. However, the Mendelssohn performance would not displace my current favorite recording of the work from the period-instruments group Hausmusik on EMI. Compared to this Naxos release, their recording is more transparent, and their performance is gentler and more poetic.

Nonetheless, the quicker tempos of the Kodaly-Auer ensemble would seem to go hand in glove with Mendelssohn's youthful enthusiasm. And finding the Mendelssohn Octet combined on the same disc with the Bruch Octet, one could hardly go wrong.

JJP