The central attraction of this release is the program: the Magnificat in D major, composed when Felix Mendelssohn was 12, is rarely enough recorded, and the main competitor for the Yale Schola Cantorum under Simon Carrington, a disc by German choral specialist Frieder Bernius, joins it with other Mendelssohn choral works rather than taking the logical step heard here. The young Mendelssohn's Magnificat was strongly shaped by the famous Bach Magnificat in D major, BWV 243, and also by a similar work of Carl Philipp Emanuel ...
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The central attraction of this release is the program: the Magnificat in D major, composed when Felix Mendelssohn was 12, is rarely enough recorded, and the main competitor for the Yale Schola Cantorum under Simon Carrington, a disc by German choral specialist Frieder Bernius, joins it with other Mendelssohn choral works rather than taking the logical step heard here. The young Mendelssohn's Magnificat was strongly shaped by the famous Bach Magnificat in D major, BWV 243, and also by a similar work of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, not included here. It'd be worth recording all three pieces together, for what the Mendelssohn work does is nothing less than help rewrite the history of Bach reception. You can recognize it as Mendelssohn, but it's very much an attempt to grasp Bach's music, and as such it shows how Bach was on Mendelssohn's mind and available to him well before the groundbreaking Bach revivals of his maturity. The piece alternates between contrapuntal choral material and highly ornate solos...
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