Mendelssohn Gets Vocal Endorsement

By the 1950s, the vocal works and a good deal else of Felix Mendelssohn’s considerable output were nearly forgotten, generally regarded as too polite, too softly sentimental for the tensely brave new world in which we were rediscovering the vitality of the Baroque and such sweatily neurotic matter as Mahler’s symphonies.

Now, Mendelssohn would seem to be having his day again, if recorded frequency is any indication, beginning with the oratorio “Elijah,” the biggest, once most popular and therefore eventually most excoriated of Mendelssohn’s vocal works. It is back with a quantitative vengeance.

Those who expected the usual, comfortably pious “Elijah,” however, may be unnerved by its latest recorded showing, in which Philippe Herreweghe conducts his own, superbly accomplished Chapelle Royale and Collegium Vocale choruses and the skilled period instrument players of the Orchestre des Champs Elysees (Harmonia Mundi 901463/4, two CDs).

Herreweghe’s keenly dramatic leadership and the pungent harmonies created by the old instruments, the brass in particular, contribute to a most vivid and satisfying revival of music long buried in a piety that is only partially the composer’s doing.

Herreweghe is further blessed by the presence of an exceptionally strong quartet of soloists: Petteri Salomaa, with his wonderfully pliant and plangent basso, by turns warmly paternal and sternly authoritative in the title part; soprano Soile Isokoski; mezzo Monica Groop; tenor John Mark Ainsley. The first three, remarkably, all hail from Finland.

The earlier, lesser-known Second Symphony, “Lobgesang” (1840), is in fact three orchestral movements followed by a huge vocal finale using Biblical texts to praise the importance of “the word” in conjunction with the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

Much of it is prime Mendelssohn: sweetly melodic, dramatically restrained but, again, with a more lively than previously suspected harmonic life via this first recording utilizing period instruments--those of Das Neue Orchester (presumably German) under one Christoph Spering (likewise), who is also responsible for training the splendidly mobile Chorus Musicus Koln (Opus 111 Records 30-98).

Among the soloists, soprano Isokoski is again a standout, offering poised, firm-toned vocalism and exemplary textual projection.

The cantata “Die erste Walpurgisnacht” (1843) is Mendelssohn’s colorful setting of Goethe’s sly ballad about the conflict between free-spirited pagan Celts and buttoned-up Christians over the former’s jolly springtime revels. The composer, following the poet’s lead, stacks the odds in favor of the unbelievers, by giving them better music.

This is Mendelssohn’s most adventurous, uninhibited and imaginatively scored choral work--the least Classical, the most Romantic, which may account for its falling out of favor among later listeners, obsessed with the composer’s wimpily angelic reputation.

Two recordings of “Walpurgisnacht” arrive almost simultaneously. One (Teldec 74882) documents a 1992 live performance in Graz in which Nikolaus Harnoncourt leads not his period-instrument Concentus Musicus but the modern-instrument Chamber Orchestra of Europe (an opportunity lost), Vienna’s virtuosic Arnold Schoenberg Chorus and a fine vocal quartet including tenor Uwe Heilmann and baritone Thomas Hampson.

What this well-executed edition lacks is, ironically, an enlivening touch of the often exasperating interpretive daring that Harnoncourt brings to his performances of 18th-Century music.

It’s all rather safe and tame when compared to a handsomely remastered 1974 studio production in which Kurt Masur leads the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and lusty Leipzig Radio Chorus (Berlin Classics 2057).

Masur’s joyfully gutsy performance is also imaginatively coupled with a trio of unhackneyed Mendelssohn overtures and the concert aria, “Infelice!” sung with becoming intensity by soprano Edda Moser, while Harnoncourt charmlessly leads familiar selections from the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” incidental score.