These two boyhood works of Mendelssohn, dating from his early teens, make an excellent coupling, providing generous measure too, when the brilliant boy was here writing more expansively than he did in his later, mature concertos. Given that these works were first heard in the Sunday salons of the composer’s banker father, it is logical that they should be recorded here not just on period instruments but with a small band of strings, in places one instrument per part. What is less welcome is that the strings of Concerto Koln adopt what might be regarded as an unreconstructed view of period string-playing, so that the orchestral tuttis are rather trying, not least in slow movements, even on an ear well adjusted to period performance.
The soloists, both outstanding, provide a total contrast, and there the violinist, Rainer Kussmaul, is if anything even more impressive than Andreas Staier, for many years the harpsichordist of Concerto Koln and here the director as well as soloist. Throughout the Double Concerto Kussmaul plays with rare freshness and purity, allowing himself just a measure of vibrato, and if Staier takes second place, that is not just a question of balance between the violin and an 1825 fortepiano by Johann Fritz of Vienna, but of the young composer’s piano writing, regularly built on passagework, often in arpeggios, rather than straight melodic statements. No doubt that had something to do with the pianos of the day, with their limited sustaining power.
That applies to the piano writing in the Piano Concerto too, and it is striking that though each work is astonishing from a composer so young, the Double Concerto, written just a year later, reveals a clear development. The material is not nearly as memorable in either work as it is in such a masterpiece as the Octet of two years later, yet in every movement, not least the finales of both works, there is much that clearly identifies the composer as Mendelssohn. Among rival recordings I would single out the intensely characterful performance of the Double Concerto with Kremer and Argerich as soloists, but in their way Kussmaul and Staier on a different scale are comparably compelling.'