This being the Mendelssohn bicentenary (with Tuesday the anniversary of his birth), we can be sure that few corners of his output will go unexplored. Gail Archer, who spent last year surveying Messiaens complete organ works, recently started a five-concert Mendelssohn series. But while Ms. Archer is padding her concerts with music by Romantic contemporaries like Schumann and Brahms, another organist, Felix Hell, has packed the complete Mendelssohn and nothing but into three concise programs at the Church of the Transfiguration. He presented the first on Sunday night.
Since Mendelssohn was among the foremost movers behind the rediscovery of Bachs music during the 19th century, it comes as little surprise that Bachs style looms large in much of Mendelssohns organ music. Lucid polyphony is pervasive, lending credence to reports of Mendelssohns prodigious skills as an organist. Mr. Hell, 23, is himself a prodigy, having performed in public since he was 8. Playing on the churchs Arnold Schwartz Memorial Organ, a handsome, versatile tracker instrument, built by the C. B. Fisk company of Gloucester, Mass., in 1988, Mr. Hell demonstrated a superlative technique, with especially fluent work on the pedals.
Most of the brief chorales and fugues in Mr. Hells program were strongly reminiscent of Bachs music, at times thickened with Romantic harmonies. Greater originality and variety came in two works from Mendelssohns Opus 65, six sonatas written on a commission from the English publishing firm Coventry & Hollier.
Asked to write a set of voluntaries, Mendelssohn who admitted in an 1844 letter to Coventry that he did not understand what the term meant fashioned a series of small pieces, then arranged them into multimovement works for publication in 1845. The sonatas do not adhere to sonata form in any conventional sense, but each has a satisfying balance of contrasting parts.
Mr. Hell brought an imposing pomp to the Grave-Adagio that opened the Sonata No. 2 in C minor and dazzled with his fluid motion during the works finale. But his tenderness in the Andante religioso of the Sonata No. 4 in B flat showed that he was also equal to Mendelssohns effortless way with a simple, effective tune.
Felix Hell will give the last of his Mendelssohn recitals on Tuesday at the Church of the Transfiguration (Little Church Around the Corner, Episcopal), 1 East 29th Street, Manhattan, (212) 684-6770, littlechurch.org.
Home » Jazz News » Performance / Tour
Felix Hell Pomp and Mendelssohn with Fluid Pedal Work
By the reckoning of some, Mendelssohns organ music included several of the most significant pieces for the instrument since those of Bach. That contention hardly seems remarkable, given Mendelssohns astonishing mastery across a range of genres. Yet whereas his orchestral and chamber works are widely known, the organ music is largely the stuff of cognoscenti.
