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This recording presents all of Mendelssohn’s published work for cello and piano, and an unpublished fragment which is recorded here for the first time. These lively graceful works have, like much of his chamber music, been quite unjustly in eclipse since his lifetime, and have only in recent years found their way into the popular repertoire.

For a long time Mendelssohn’s music suffered from Romantic traditions of performance: exaggerated rubato, heavy phrasing and florid contrasts of colour. These distorted the true character of his music and made it sound pompous and sentimental. Yet Mendelssohn’s own nature was quite different. His formative influences were Bach and Mozart and his allegiance was to the Classical era; he himself often noted how different he felt to his famous Romantic contemporaries Berlioz, Chopin and Wagner. Perhaps we can learn to see him more as Schumann saw him: ‘the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most illuminating of composers, who sees more clearly than others through the contradictions of our time and is the first to reconcile them’.

The Sonata in B flat major, Opus 45, was written around the beginning of 1838. In a letter of January 20th he mentions that it is finished, and also that he had been suffering from an ear infection which had left him temporarily deaf in one ear and fearful of the consequences. It was, nevertheless, a happy time: his wife Cecile was about to give birth to their first child, Karl Wolfgang Paul, who was born on February 7th. The child’s third name was in honour of Mendelssohn’s brother Paul, a financier and amateur cellist for whom this sonata, and the earlier Variations concertantes, were written.
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