Markovina’s Latest “Complete Works” Project

courtesy of Naxos of America

Readers that have been following my work since my Examiner.com days may recall that a major high point in my listening experiences took place in the spring of 2014, when Naxos provided me with a download of the complete keyboard music composed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Pianist Ana-Marija Markovina filled a box set of 26 CDs released by hänssler CLASSIC; and when I wrote about the collection, I described it as “impressively thorough.” More specifically, the contents of the box set included the unpublished works, as well as the published ones, and the entries in Eugene Helm’s 1989 catalog that had not been included in the 1906 catalog compiled by Alfred Wotquenne.

Tomorrow hänssler CLASSIC will release Markovina’s latest “complete works” project. This time the composer is Felix Mendelssohn, accounted for by “only” twelve CDs. The scare quotes are intended to put the quantity in perspective. Bach died at the age of 74 in 1788. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, was only 38 years old when he died in 1847, which makes his productivity in writing solo piano music roughly on the same scale as Bach’s. As expected, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

My guess is that many readers have both the first and second volumes of the Dover Publications reprint of Mendelssohn’s complete piano music. Published in 1975, the source was a “complete works” edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1874 and 1877. Suffice it to say that a fair amount of Mendelssohn scholarship has taken place since then, and Markovina’s recordings owe a great debt to the results of all of that scholarship.

Most importantly, she has organized her recordings according the to Mendelssohn-Werkverzeichnis (MWV, “Mendelssohn Work Index” in English), which was not published until 2009. This is basically chronologically ordered. For the most part, Markovina follows that order with minor exceptions, the most evident being prelude-fugue couplings when the two pieces were written in different years. As a result, the earliest work in the Dover collection, the Opus 14 “Rondo Capriccioso” in E major, does not show up until the sixth CD.

However, in addition to providing the date of composition for each of her selections, Markovina also adds commentary. This can simply be a reflection for the benefit of the listener, such as “A thoughtful, personal piece he dedicated to Fanny.” On the other hand, when more extensive commentary is required, Markovina provides it. That is the case for Opus 14 (MWV U 67), which was given the date 1824 in the Dover reprint. According to Markovina, however, the piece was originally written in 1828; but it was not published until (at least) 1830, when Mendelssohn added the slow introduction for the seventeen-year-old Delphine van Schauroth.

To be fair, I am pretty sure that there are many listeners (and, possibly, readers) out there that will react to Markovina’s efforts by declaring, “This package tells me more about Mendelssohn than I would ever want to know!” Those familiar with my work know that I am not one of those listeners! Nevertheless, while I acknowledge all the effort in both performing and documenting that Markovina put into making this release, I have to confess that Mendelssohn never really tweaks my “little grey cells” (thank you, Hercule Poirot) the way that Bach does. I suppose I can say that his compositions may be technically challenging, but they tend to be rhetorically facile. So, while listening to any one of Markovina’s Bach CDs still keeps me on the edge of my seat, her capable execution of Mendelssohn comes across as little more than “one damned thing after another.”

That said, I am sure that there are any number of passionate Mendelssohn admirers out there that will react far more enthusiastically than I did to this impressively comprehensive new release!