The Concerto was written for another violinist-friend of the composer, Ferdinand David, whom Mendelssohn had appointed his concertmaster when he became conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835. If the D-minor Concerto is the handiwork of precocious youth, betraying its indebtedness to earlier models, the canonic Mendelssohn Concerto, in E minor, is not only the creation of a mature master, but sui generis: brimming with lyric inspiration and structural inventiveness. In his thirteenth year he wrote a concerto in D minor for violin and string orchestra - not for his own performance but for his teacher Eduard Rietz, older by only three years, later to become founder of the Berlin Philharmonic Society and concertmaster for Mendelssohn's epochal revival, in 1829, of the Bach St. Mendelssohn first showed his skills as a violinist by participating at age nine in musicales in the family's Berlin home. Both would, however, choose the piano as their primary performing instrument. The return of the first theme in the orchestra signals the beginning of the recapitulation, where the principal themes are restated.Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, and solo violinįirst Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: January 2, 1920, with Sylvain Noack, Walter Henry Rothwell conductingĪmong the less publicized facts about Felix Mendelssohn is that he, like Mozart, was a child-prodigy violinist as well as a child-prodigy pianist. The orchestra returns and the violin-horse gallops away over the hills of the first theme played by the flutes, oboes, and first violins. Like an old zoetrope animation of a horse, each note combines with the next to produce a fluid, flickering phrase. At the end of the cadenza the violinist plays ricochet bowing, letting the bow skip across the strings with just enough bite to pick out each note along the way (bar 332, 9:35). The cadenza begins with trills, arpeggios, and chords with the pensive gravity of a prelude by J. He extended the cadenza before its premiere in consultation with Ferdinand David, the virtuoso violinist for whom he wrote the concerto.

The cadenza we hear today was not Mendelssohn's first crack at it. Furthermore, Mendelssohn composed his cadenza instead of letting the soloist improvise. The cadenza was a designated space for improvisation at the end of a movement, not in the middle. At the end of the development section, the orchestra unexpectedly leaves the violinist to play a solo cadenza (299, 8:16), which would have been a remarkable turn of events for a nineteenth-century audience.

Mendelssohn violin concerto