| The town of Leipzig plays a central role in the life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809?1847), as an important music capital of early nineteenth-century Germany. Besides Mendelssohn's highly important revival there of Johann Sebastian Bach's "St. Matthew Passion", he had also been living in Leipzig since 1837, acting as co-founder and first director of the music conservatoire and, not least, taking over direction of the famous Gewandhaus orchestra between 1835 and 1840. All this was acknowledged in the 1997 "Mendelssohn gala performance" in which Kurt Masur - long the orchestra?s chief conductor - devoted a whole evening to the work of his most important predecessor. This highly successful programme of Mendelssohn?s chief orchestral works was recorded in the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The programme included "A Midsummer Night's Dream" op. 61, the violin concerto in E minor op. 64, and the "Scottish Symphony" op.56. |
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