Felix MENDELSSOHN : STRING QUARTET Op 12 - STRING QUINTET No 1 - Prazak & Zemlinsky Quartet

Two works completed before the composer turned 23. These ‘music scores of happiness’ in which, according to Baillot, one allegedly finds the ‘joyous laughter of the elves’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, denotes an amazingly precocious assimilation of the avant-gardist conquests of a Beethoven who had just died. Schumann even asserted: ‘He is the Mozart of the 19th century; he is the brightest composer of the age, and he comprehends, with finest humour, the contradictions of our time more clearly than anyone, so that he is the first to reconcile them’.

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