Record of the day: Roberto Prosseda, “Mendelssohn Discoveries”

Roberto Prosseda, “Mendelssohn Discoveries” (Cd Decca 4763038)

Although Felix Mendelssohn is one of the composers most loved by the general public and his fame has never diminished over the centuries, this does not mean that the entirety of his production is known or accessible to musicians; there are a large quantity of piano pieces that are still unpublished, neither published nor performed, hidden in archives and libraries.

Mendelssohn himself confided to Schumann that he had published about a fifth of everything he had written for the keyboard and it is incredible that only now are there performers interested in performing these pages, retrieving them from unjust oblivion. Naturally we do not always find ourselves faced with immortal masterpieces or compositions indispensable for the artistic understanding of the author, but Mendelssohn’s precocious genius was such as to ensure a perfect capacity for compositional developments and piano writing starting from his earliest works.

Even in works of a more rhapsodic nature, such as the beautiful “Fantasy in C Minor/D Major”, composed when he was only fourteen, Mendelssohn’s innate sense of form allows him to masterfully stitch together very different and very contrasting ideas, giving the impression of witnessing the formidable piano improvisations for which the musician was celebrated. Even the enchanting “Romance without words in F major” and the “Lied in E flat major” deserve to fully enter the piano repertoire, having nothing to envy of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” in terms of melodic beauty and evocative capacity enclosed in a delicate aphorism.

This album created by one of the best pianists of the latest generation, Roberto Prosseda (who also undertook a long period of rediscovery and study of these manuscripts), offers us 15 pieces in the first ever recording, for over 78 minutes of absolutely to know. The piano transcriptions that Mendelssohn created from his own incidental music for Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” are extremely effective; by transposing one of his most famous orchestral pieces to the piano, the author manages to preserve intact the freshness and lightness of his writing through a tonally very rich use of the keyboard, of great virtuosity and at the same time of almost immaterial weight.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.