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Arnold Mendelssohn (1855-1933) was the son of a second-cousin of Felix Mendelssohn. He was a lawyer who abandoned that profession to become a full-time composer/conductor/pianist. His two string quartets come from relatively late in his career, having been written in 1916 and 1917. They can be characterized as late romantic with a soupçon of expressionism, à la Reger, Zemlinsky or Hugo Wolf. The quartets are a bit strange in that the opening and final movements of both quartets are fairly classically structured in sonata form -- exposition with two or three themes, development, recapitulation and coda -- and the scherzos are jolly dance movements, one a waltz, the other ländler, but the slow movements are knotty, hyperchromatic and emotionally dense. It is in these movements that Mendelssohn's music looks forward, but somehow these slow movements don't fit in well with the 1st, 3rd and 4th movements, almost as if they had come from other works entirely.

It is clear that Mendelssohn was a meticulous craftsman with all the requisite skill to write music in extended forms, but frankly his less than memorable melodies and his labored third movements tend to erode the works.

The Reinhold-Quartett, all of whose members are principals in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, play beautifully.


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