Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Piano Sonatas – Marino Nahon

All three Piano Sonatas by Mendelssohn were written before the composer reached age twenty; however, they are the fruit of an extremely mature musical personality, who mastered the complexity of the Sonata Form without uncertainties, and who had abundant musical ideas of his own which are poured profusely in these three beautiful creations. Mendelssohn was a great piano virtuoso and a very well-educated young man, who knew the music of the past as very few of his contemporaries did. His music, therefore, grows from a fruitful encounter of the tradition of the past with the ideas, tensions, and styles of the Romantic era. The earliest of these Sonatas was written when Mendelssohn was not yet a teenager, and is inspired by Haydn; the second, highly poetic and with an enchanting slow movement, is already under the shadow of Beethoven; the third engages creatively with Beethoven’s legacy, before abandoning the form of the Piano Sonatas, to which Mendelssohn would return no more in the years to come.