Felix Mendelssohn: String Quintets Nos. 1 & 2

In February 2009 we met for the first time for a small rehearsal-concert, thus in immediate temporal proximity to Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday. Thus the choice of repertoire for this experiment was made quite quickly, a Mendelssohn was to be included. After a happy start, the decision was also spontaneously made as to what the newly founded ensemble should be called……. Especially with the two Mendelssohn quintets, there is another challenge of spontaneous chamber music parties: Actually, these pieces are simply too difficult for that. You can no longer hear the main voices in the 16th-note tumult of the B-flat major quintet, you get hopelessly tangled up in the highly virtuosic polyphony of the last movement of the A-major quintet, or you fall into the abyss during the spiccato toe-dance in its scherzo (even if the second viola should have survived the first eight solo bars without embarrassment). ….. Mendelssohn often made extensive changes, often deletions, to works between completion of composition and printing (sometimes a period of several years). Sometimes it is not entirely clear from the outside what the reasons for this might have been. It is also sometimes questionable whether it was really he himself who initiated and authorized these changes and authorized them. The question thus arises as to the weighting of autograph and first printing….. We have decided in principle to include the version from Mendelssohn’s autograph and to dispense with deletions. However, we have also included the later version, which may not have been changed by Mendelssohn himself, but by Julius Rietz but by Julius Rietz, which many connoisseurs surely have in their mind’s ear. We also find it very beautiful. Decide for yourself!…. The content and form of our quintet work are our musical fountain of youth. Discovering new things together in great familiarity with what we have known for a long time, coming from very different directions (geographically we are also spread all over the country), experiencing the whole thing with great individual freedom, without a marriage certificate, as a permanent string quartet would require. But in deep mutual musical and friendly understanding – this is how we are allowed to realize our ideal of making music together. (from the booklet text)