Felix Mendelssohn: Die erste Walpurgisnacht; Vom Himmel hoch; Fanny Mendelssohn:
Hiob; Gartenlieder
Julia Doyle (soprano), Jess Dandy (contralto) et al; Crouch End Festival Chorus; London Mozart Players/David Temple
Chandos CHSA5318 (CD/SACD)
71:53 mins
Of the many current recordings to pair the sibling composers Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Mendelssohn, this is one of the most unusual yet, featuring choral rarities by both – and the music offers some surprises.
Felix’s cantata Vom Himmel hoch, though written while the composer was in Italy and exploring music in Rome, is so Lutheran that he seems to be trying to become Bach. It’s full of deliberately rousing, celebratory sounds, but memorable for sadly little else. As for Die erste Walpurgisnacht, a secular cantata based on Goethe in which a druid village plays a practical joke to scare off the Christians, it has some pleasingly spooky moments, but I’m not sure I’d necessarily go rushing to hear it again.
Fanny fares rather better. Her Hiob, a cantata on Old Testament words, feels slightly too truncated, if anything, and it’s infuriating to see that it lay unpublished until 1992. Still, the one really wonderful discovery is her Gartenlieder, six a cappella choral settings of nature-related poems that turn out to be stunningly beautiful. The performances unfortunately don’t always help the works’ causes.
Among the soloists, there’s a welcome spotlight for Jess Dandy’s molasses-dark contralto, but the team proves uneven, with Ashley Riches’s occasionally overdone vibrato and Mark Le Brocq’s energetically effortful tenor contrasting with Julia Doyle’s rather underpowered soprano. The ensemble, meanwhile, is a tad loose at the seams, both within the London Mozart Players and in their coordination with the Crouch End Festival Chorus; and the latter, though performing with plenty of enthusiasm, sometimes seem to struggle with higher tessituras and German diction. Overall, then, there are good moments, but too few of them.