Anniversary madness
NewsWarner Classics, a record label, is marketing a coffin-sized box of the ‘greatest compositions’ of Felix Mendelssohn. Not the complete works, note, just the ones they have in the vaults, but enough to fill 40 CDs.
What’s the sales tag?
An anniversary, of course: ‘For Mendelssohn’s 215th anniversary, Warner Classics releases a brand-new boxed set of his greatest compositions,…’
Bananas.
This kind of recording project is the province of Brilliant Classics. Without any anniversary (or quasi-anniversary) hype, they have released massive boxed sets of the (allegedly but not exactly) complete works of Mozart and Beethoven, as well as a huge Haydn boxed set of 150 CDs – and there are others. The recordings are excellent, combining modern superb digital recordings with remastered classic performances from the past, on licence from Philips and other major sources. BC have already issued the ‘complete Mendelssohn masterpieces’ on 29 CDs.
These BC boxes are going for a song, as it were, and are generally preferable to the more costly sets from the major labels.
My hunch is that most readers of this blog, as sophisticated and experienced as they are, would admit (or soon learn) that there is much is the Mendelssohn catalog, particularly chamber music, that they inadequately know, perhaps because Wagner, Charles Rosen, George Bernard Shaw and others tended to pre-poison our expectations and thus discouraged curiosity about his less-known works. I happen to think Mendelssohn is under-rated as a composer and that in spite of that fact that almost everyone rates him highly!
For my ‘money’, his organ sonatas are among his most undervalued and in some places most underappreciated works.
Do you intend to bury bananas in that coffin?
Why do you invent an anniversary when obviously no one is speaking of such reason? Has Warner communicated about an anniversary or is this the only way you can think of to release something?
Well, I suppose 215 is a rounder number than the 177th anniversary of his death.
40 CD’s will make a reasonable listening session. I wonder what’s missing?
They did the same thing for Rossini a couple of years ago–a big 50 CD box of recent and vintage gold mixed with dross from all the vaults in the Warner Classics empire.