Symphony No.2 'lobgesang'

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, in a lifetime of concert-going I've never heard Mendelssohn's Second Symphony, 'Lobgesang' ('Song of Praise') although I have participated in a choral performance of the 'Nun danket alle Gott' portion by itself. In fact, until this recording I've never owned a performance of it on disc. I've been living with the piece, and the recording, for a couple of weeks now and am bound to say that it is an impressive albeit at times maddening piece.

First, a little background. The work was written in 1840 as part of the musical celebration of the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of movable type. (Fun fact: For the same celebration Mendelssohn, in the 'Festgesang', wrote the tune that became, in English, 'Hark, the Herald Angels Sing' .) The layout of the 'Lobgesang' symphony is similar to that of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, namely three instrumental movements followed by a choral movement (or in this case nine connected movements). Mendelssohn himself called the work a 'symphony-cantata'. Fittingly, and not surprisingly, Mendelssohn chose passages from Luther's German translation of the Bible for his text. Luther's Bible was surely one of the most printed texts in the century following Gutenberg's invention. I leave for someone else the job of explicating those texts. Suffice it to say that they are more or less unconnected passages that meditate on faith, praise, and despair. Although called Mendelssohn's Second Symphony it was actually the fourth that he wrote. He had already written the Italian (No. 4) but had held it unperformed for further revision. And he'd also written the 'Reformation' Symphony (No. 5) but felt it was a failure and it, too, had not yet been performed.

The three instrumental movements are played without pause. The first movement begins with a celebratory trombone figure that is a bit prosaic made all the more noticeably so by its maddening reiteration in an otherwise fine movement. This is followed by an Allegretto, a bouncy scherzo of sorts. Then comes an Adagio religioso with a good deal of four-part chorale (shades of Luther) that opens out into a beautifully elaborated hymn of praise. The sung movements are, in English: 1) Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord, 2) Praise the Lord, o my soul, 3) Proclaim it, you who are delivered through the Lord, 4) I waited for the Lord, 5) The bonds of death had held us - We cried in the darkness, 6) The night is ended, 7) Now thank we all our God, 8) Therefore I sing with my song, and 9) Ye nations, bring the Lord honor and might. The chorus is supplemented by two soprano soloists (Ruth Ziesak and Mojca Erdmann) and a tenor soloist (Christian Elsner). 'I waited for the Lord' is a lovely soprano duet with a here gorgeously played horn obbligato. But the glory of this piece are the choral portions. Particularly marvelous are 'The night is ended', 'Now thank we all our God' and the final chorus, all of which have Mendelssohn's miraculously seamless counterpoint, informed by Bachian gestures coupled with 19th-century Romantic melodic turns.

What of the performance? At first glance, at least to an American music-lover, the forces are not perceived as first-rank. With the exception of Ruth Ziesak, none of these musicians is well-known on this side of the Atlantic. However, one soon realizes that these are excellent, committed, warm yet crisp performances by all concerned. Conductor Jun Märkl is known to me from his admirable recordings for French music with the Orchestre Nationale de Lyon. The chorus on the present disc is actually used in one of those recordings (well, it's the women of the MDR Chorus in Debussy's 'Sirènes') Debussy: Nocturnes; Clair de lune; Pelleas et Melisande - Symphonie and in Ravel's 'Daphnis et Chloé' Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé (Complete Ballet in Three Parts) ). The MDR Symphony Orchestra is Leipzig's 'second' orchestra (after the Gewandhaus) but this orchestra of the Mid-German Radio has a long and illustrious history; Märkl took over as Chief Conductor from the equally talented Fabio Luisi in 2007.

So, if you don't already have a satisfactory performance of the Lobgesang I can easily recommend this one, particularly since it is at Naxos's budget price.

Timing: 68:41

Scott Morrison

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