Mendelssohn — the cutting edge
It is not often that a Mendelssohn programme is promoted as ‘cutting edge’. But this is exactly how Christopher Hogwood describes his March 2004 concerts with The Academy of Ancient Music, the period instrument ensemble he founded in 1973. In fact, it is only on the condition that he be allowed to construct a programme that ‘I thought more cutting edge’ that he is standing before them at all this season.
‘I don’t want to constantly go on doing Brandenburg concertos and Mozart symphonies with them,’ he says. ‘Thirty years of that is quite enough for any one person’s viewpoint. They should be doing that, and are doing that, with a lot of different directors, where it comes up very fresh and new. I would rather encourage them towards other areas where I think work needs to be done.’
Like restoring the original sound-world of Mendelssohn, for example. Hogwood is currently producing a new series of urtext editions of the composer’s overtures for the publisher Baerenreiter, and this month’s concerts in Cambridge and London include his new ‘old’ editions of the Hebrides Overture Fingal’s Cave and Die schöne Melusine).
‘There’s 30 or 40 pages of commentary!’ laughs Hogwood when I ask what is different about them, before giving me a succinct digest. ‘There are two very distinct versions of Hebrides, one that he wrote in Rome and one that he wrote for London with a differing number of bars and quite a lot of changes.’
Audiences can expect ‘to find sometimes different tunes. There are a lot of subtle changes — he was constantly exploring orchestration. But there are quite a lot of structural changes — the first version of Fingal’s Cave has more counterpoint in it as well as more bars. And it has passages which are definitely reminiscent of the Reformation Symphony, and I think for that reason he took them out in the second version.’
‘And there are two very distinct versions of Die schöne Melusine. The first he asked to be destroyed, but everybody said it was so nice and it had been played so successfully in London they were hanging on to it.’
‘The first version is very clear and very dramatic. I think he worked on a second version because he wanted it to be more academically integrated. He worked a lot on combining themes and making obvious transitions, developments of material, whereas the first version is rather more clearly outlined, and I think no worse.’
Though this is not the first performance of Hogwood’s new editions, he adds that ‘I’ve very rarely done them with period instruments, so I guess it’ll be the first performances with the sonorities that Mendelssohn had in mind.’
Certainly, Hogwood was pleased with the dimension AAM’s instruments added to his new edition of Mendelssohn’s Trumpet Overture earlier this season. ‘With period brass it sounded terrific and I must say not at all bombastic — as it well might with American symphonic brass.’
Martin Cullingford is Gramophone News & Online Editor
www.gramophone.co.uk