Document

  1998
    May 1998
        Instrumental
                Mendelssohn Piano Works.

Mendelssohn Piano Works, Volume 4. Benjamin Frith (pf).

Naxos (Super budget price) (CD) 8 553358 (59 minutes: DDD).

Piano Sonata in G minor, Op. 105. Fantasia on “The last rose of summer”, Op. 15. Study in F minor. Capriccio in E, Op. 118. Zwei Klavierstucke. Variations in B flat, Op. 83. Scherzo a capriccio in F sharp minor.

He “liked it very much”, so wrote the 12-year-old Mendelssohn after introducing his recently completed G minor Sonata to the 72-year-old Goethe. Frith plays its cunningly crafted, eighteenth-century-inspired flanking movements with an engaging, mercurial fleetness, and captures that note of searching unpredictability that makes the central Adagio so remarkable an achievement for a child. I was no less impressed by his obvious feeling for the much later (1841) Variations on a gravely expressive theme in B flat, well able to hold its own alongside that of the familiar Variations serieuses. How sad that the work’s burgeoning continuity, with near “marche funebre” connotations in Nos. 4 and 5, is so rudely shattered by the composer’s hollow ending. Volume 4 also brings the rarely heard Fantasia on “The last rose of summer” where Frith almost manages to weld impossibly improvisational alternations of mood into a unified whole.

Of the miniatures, none are more winning than the Zwei Klavierstucke, the first as romantic a reverie as any in the Songs without Words, the second a-tingle with darting sprites who not for a moment outstay their welcome. Though the same cannot truthfully be said of the remaining patterned gambols, there is unfailing help throughout the disc’s 59 minutes from the arresting counter-claims of Frith’s uncommonly purposeful left-hand. The sound quality is acceptable.

JOC



		He “liked it very much”, so wrote the 12-year-old Mendelssohn after introducing his recently completed G minor Sonata to the 72-year-old Goethe. Frith plays its cunningly crafted, eighteenth-century-inspired flanking movements with an engaging, mercurial fleetness, and captures that note of searching unpredictability that makes the central Adagio so remarkable an achievement for a child. I was no less impressed by his obvious feeling for the much later (1841) Variations on a gravely expressive theme in B flat, well able to hold its own alongside that of the familiar Variations serieuses. How sad that the work’s burgeoning continuity, with near “marche funebre” connotations in Nos. 4 and 5, is so rudely shattered by the composer’s hollow ending. Volume 4 also brings the rarely heard Fantasia on “The last rose of summer” where Frith almost manages to weld impossibly improvisational alternations of mood into a unified whole.



		Of the miniatures, none are more winning than the Zwei Klavierstucke, the first as romantic a reverie as any in the Songs without Words, the second a-tingle with darting sprites who not for a moment outstay their welcome. Though the same cannot truthfully be said of the remaining patterned gambols, there is unfailing help throughout the disc’s 59 minutes from the arresting counter-claims of Frith’s uncommonly purposeful left-hand. The sound quality is acceptable.