next to an item to add it to your Itinerary basket. You will then be able to save, download, or share your itinerary.
About
Mendelssohn the trailblazer. Such is the vitality, mould-breaking invention and imagination of his orchestral music, it is easy to forget how forward-looking the music is. The First Symphony (written when the composer was just 15) is from the same year as Beethoven's Ninth, and looks forward to the Romantic era, with music that loosened the shackles of classical form and drew inspiration from art, literature, and landscape.
A feisty and ingenious piano concerto follows (Schiff, a passionate devotee, directs from the fortepiano). Mendelssohn's 'Italian' Symphony is awash with the sounds of his travels, from the swirling opening where our feet barely touch the ground, through a soulful Neapolitan procession, to the headlong rush of the finale, with its biting rhythms and scampering folksiness.
