September 22, 2009: A more conducive setting for Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn is one of those composers whose listening experiences can easily be influenced by the company his music keeps.  Thus, when the Cypress String Quartet played his Opus 13 quartet in A minor, a product of his teenage years, last June, it was easily overwhelmed by the music of the mature Franz Schubert (the single-movement Allegro "Quartett-Satz" in C minor, D. 703), which preceded it.  At today's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, cellist Rebecca Rust's selections (the Opus 109 "Song Without Words" and the second D major sonata, Opus 58, both accompanied by pianist Joan Nagano) were offered in a less intimidating context.  They were preceded by a trio sonata by Johann Paul Schiffelholz in which Rust and Nagano were joined by bassoonist Friedrich Edelmann (who happens to be Rust's husband).

Little is known of Schiffelholz other than his interest in a particular variety of baroque lute known as both the mandora and the gallichon.  (Schiffelholz does not even have his own entry in the online version of Grove.)  Still, this was an interesting composition in that both bassoon and cello served as solo voices, leaving the continuo entirely to the keyboard.  The style of the work left me wondering if Schiffelholz had been one of those composer's recruited by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's publisher to composer "new Pergolesi works" after the composer's early death by tuberculosis;  but, since there is no record of Schiffelholz leaving Germany and other composers of "fake Pergolesi" have been identified, my guess is that he did not participate in this scam.  Nevertheless, at least in this particular trio sonata, Schiffelholz certainly shared Pergolesi's interest in the lower voices.

This baroque introduction was certainly consistent with Mendelssohn's own interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, even if neither of Rust's selections was particularly Bach-like.  The "Song Without Words" is a genre that Mendelssohn pursued primarily in his solo piano compositions.  The cello composition, the only one of its kind, was composed in 1845, the same year in which Mendelssohn completed his eighth (and final) book of such compositions for piano.  It is one of his last works and was one of Pablo Casals' favorite encores.  Like much of Mendelssohn's work, it is not particularly adventurous but represents the graceful side of Mendelssohn's style, a spirit that was delightfully captured by Rust and Nagano.

The D major sonata was composed in 1843, which, in terms of Mendelssohn's cello writing, puts it about two years prior to the second C minor piano trio (Opus 67), as well as the "Song Without Words."  This is the closest the program got to Bach, with an Adagio movement that could be described as a latter-day chorale prelude.  The score gives no indication of a chorale source, however;  and the full chords, which need to be arpeggiated (see the above excerpt), depart significantly from Bach's syntax, logic, and rhetoric.  Reflecting into the future, it is also worth nothing that Mendelssohn was a major influence on the composer Arthur Sullivan;  so it should not surprise anyone that a theme that would later be heard in "Trial by Jury" surfaces as the trio in the Allegretto scherzando movement.

Needless to say, the allegro movements all exhibit Mendelssohn's particularly rapid-fire approach to virtuosity;  and both Rust and Nagano were definitely up to maintaining his pace in these passages.  Similar virtuosity also dominated their choice of an encore, the Opus 43 "Allegro appassionato" by Camille Saint-Saëns.