Mendelssohn: Lieder Ohne Worte, Books 5-8, Vol. 2 – Brautigam

   in Piano International (Nov, 2016)
Ronald Brautigam’s second disc of Mendelssohn’s miniatures is on similar lines to his first: four volumes of Songs without Words and five ‘individual’ Songs without Words as a surrogate set (the final one in E-flat, MWV U82, is given in R Larry Todd’s completion), all played on Ian McNulty’s 2010 replica of a Pleyel instrument from 1830 to allow us to hear the pieces as Mendelssohn would. All 37 individual pieces are considerably less than three minutes long, and heard at a single sitting they tend to blur together; I longed for another track of the same inspiration – and singularity – as the evergreen ‘Frühlingslied’. Some may find …