Javier Perianes’s Mendelssohn release with Harmonia Mundi has already garnered high praise from critics, and for good reason: his sound is warm without being heavy (essential for Mendelssohn), and his interpretation is tender without being cloying. His gentle touch and masterful voice leading bring to mind Murray Perahia’s 1999 recording of many of these same works. However, where Perahia’s somewhat restrained interpretation leaves this listener feeling distant, Perianes’s interpretation draws the listener in to enjoy the stories these famously absolute miniatures conjure in our imaginations, which is precisely what Mendelssohn intended.

Repeated or continuous listenings to Mendelssohn’s piano music can often result in satiety far too quickly when pianists fall prey to its technical pitfalls. Mendelssohn’s music is difficult to perform well, despite its reputation as music for amateurs, perhaps because many pianists today are trained to play muscularly (that is, they are trained to play Beethoven). These works are filled with delicately balanced voice leading, mercurial moments of whimsy and drama, and singing melodies. Perianes executes this chimeric music perfectly. He is able to balance the layers of melody, accompaniment and figuration with astonishing precision and clarity. For example, in the Rondo capriccioso op. 14, the arpeggio figuration (at 3′ 23″) is gorgeously even and provides a shimmering background for the melody. This balancing act continues in the Prelude in E minor op. 35, no. 1, in which Perianes executes with grace the ‘three-hand’ technique so popular at the time and sustains the long, sweeping lines despite its technical difficulty. The dramatic climax of the corresponding Fugue op. 35, no. 1, however, feels forced. The onset of the chorale at the conclusion should feel like a cathartic apotheosis, but in Perianes’s interpretation, the preceding passage (marked accelerando and crescendo) reaches its peak too soon, leaving this moment deflated and rushed. This problem is partly due to Mendelssohn’s compositional decisions, however, because this passage is ponderous and perhaps a bit overwrought. My particular favourite on this CD is the Variations sérieuses op. 54. The wilting, disjunct theme is difficult to phrase elegantly while maintaining a sense of overall phrase trajectory, but Perianes’s choices here helped me to hear this theme in a completely new way despite having performed the work myself. It is in this work, however, that Perianes sometimes overemphasizes the rubato to the point of affectation.

The CD is marketed heavily towards the Lieder ohne Worte, but for me the other selections are what make this recording stand out from its competition. An apt comparison can be found in Perahia’s 1999 recording of selected Lieder ohne Worte, mentioned above; in that case, Perahia paired the Lieder ohne Worte with works by Bach, Schubert and Liszt (including some transcriptions). Perianes, however, focused exclusively on Mendelssohn and arranged his music into a set resembling a concert programme. Perianes has chosen a rarely heard work, the Andante con variazioni op. 82, to start his programme and has ended it with Mendelssohn’s much better known Variations sérieuses op. 54. The intervening Lieder ohne Worte, selected from each of the eight published books, are punctuated with the Rondo capriccioso op. 14, and the Prelude and Fugue in E minor op. 35, no. 1. In the spirit of the concert programme style, this is no offering of the ‘complete Lieder ohne Worte’; no one book is presented in its entirety here. This somewhat unconventional presentation is both refreshing (do we really need another complete recording right now?) and historically informed. Mendelssohn himself favoured mixing and matching Lieder ohne Worte in performance, and was even reported to have improvised a fantasia-like transition between two of them.Footnote ¹ (One small correction: the track list contains a typo. There is no Lied ohne Worte with an opus number of 120. The correct identifying information for track 17 is op. 102, no. 1. Mendelssohn’s op. 120, no. 1 is the ‘Jagdlied’, a work for four-part male choir.)

The liner notes by Luis Gago make the case that this programme is ‘Between Bach and Beethoven’ by virtue of Mendelssohn’s involvement in the Beethoven-Denkmal publication that spurred his creation of the variation sets and his Bach-infused Prelude and Fugue op. 35, no. 1. While these selections certainly are imbued with the spirit of those two composers, I am not convinced by the assertion that this programme is firmly ‘between Bach and Beethoven’. The Lieder ohne Worte that headline this programme (most likely because they are the most easily marketed of the works chosen here) are decidedly part of the Romantic tradition of the character piece and exhibit the influence of John Field’s nocturnes.

It is a tired assumption that Mendelssohn was a Classical composer trapped in the Romantic era. In fact, while he did revere Bach and Beethoven, and although much of their influence can be found in his music, Mendelssohn was wholly a part of the early Romantic era and contributed enormously to the development of the character piece, the concert overture as predecessor to the tone poem, and concert programming and performance practices in the nineteenth century. Mendelssohn’s adoration of the past, while perhaps more evident in his musical style than in that of his direct contemporaries, was part of the larger aesthetic of Romantic nostalgia for an idealized distant past, which was expressed through a yearning for the (imagined) innocence and simplicity of Arcadian landscapes in a ‘golden age’ long lost. This desire to encounter and relive this imagined past was so strong that some, like François-Joseph Fétis, even created fake villancicos, among other works.Footnote ² Writers like Charles Burney began to research and document music history, and in the field of poetry and fiction, James Macpherson’s 1760 Ossian epics (also fakes) became all the rage across Europe, and Sir Walter Scott created worlds of Scottish clans. The Mendelssohn family eagerly read of Scott’s romanticized North, immersed themselves in the medieval romance of Goethe’s Faust, and delighted in the Renaissance fantasy of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Mendelssohn was employed by the King of Prussia in the early 1840s, he was even commissioned to provide incidental music to Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Thus, Mendelssohn and his family, friends and fellow artists and musicians were deeply invested in imagining the past through multiple media; it is a chronological fallacy that we insist on seeing his engagement with that tradition as so highly unusual.

Despite the dubious application of the Bach-to-Beethoven programme (whether that was part of Perianes’s conception or primarily Gago’s interpretation is unclear), the value of the recording itself remains unaffected. Perianes floats over technical challenges with complete grace and makes this difficult music sound perfectly at ease; in short, he is the consummate Mendelssohn pianist, and I highly recommend this CD for any listener who seeks a new, fresh and convincing presentation of this much loved music.