An evening of organ music
Performed by Oleg Kinyaev
The programme
includes:Felix MendelssohnSix Sonatas
for Organ, Op.65
Felix Mendelssohn was a German
pianist, organist, conductor and composer. He was born in a Jewish
family which converted to Protestantism. The wonderful education he
received in his youth made him one of the most enlightened people
of the age. He knew many foreign languages, was an excellent artist
and was a passionate follower of philosophy. A pupil
of Zelter and Henning, he also became one of the greatest German
pianists, starting to compose his own works at the age
of twelve.
His frequent travels to Great Britain (from 1829
to 1847), France (1816, 1825 and 1830) and Italy (1830) brought Mendelssohn
international acclaim as a composer.
Having settled in Berlin, he
promoted and performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion
(1829). Later Mendelssohn was appointed Director of Music
in Düsseldorf (1833) and he transformed Leipzig into one of Germany’s
greatest music centres, directing the Gewandhaus and founding
a conservatoire there.
The composer himself was a concert
organist. His works for organ formed part of the powerful spectrum
of the unbroken German organ tradition. His music was particularly
well received in Great Britain, and he gave concerts at St Paul’s
Cathedral in London, Christ Church, Westminster Abbey and
in Birmingham. Having absorbed the baroque organ tradition,
Mendelssohn gave his works the “spice” of the romantic era, and
he may therefore justly be seen as the founding father of a new
genre – the romantic organ sonata. Mendelssohn composed six
of them (Op. 65). He worked on them with great enthusiasm
from 1839-1844. In 1945 they were published by Breitkopf & Härtel
in Leipzig, Riсordi in Milan and М. Schlesinger in Paris.
Interestingly, the English publication was the first publication
of organ music to include tempo instructions
for a metronome. The organ sonata gave the composer
the opportunity to experiment, freely combining baroque and romantic
genre imagery. In his cycles we can find preludes and fugues, a choral
partita, a fugue set to a chorale and fantastical forms
of different kinds.