Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was the eldest of the four Mendelssohn children and was particularly close to her younger brother Felix. She developed into an expert pianist, a composer of some 500 pieces, and a conductor of serious ability. As an upper-class woman in the Berlin of her time, she was all but forbidden from pursuing music as a career or performing in a public forum. She did, however, carry on an active musical life through salon concerts she oversaw at her family’s substantial home. That is where she introduced her Overture in C major in 1834—her only standalone orchestral composition.

Ludwig van Beethoven knew that concertos are a form of theater, and the older he grew, the more imaginative he became. In his Fourth Piano Concerto, Beethoven offered his most radical move to date—to begin with the piano alone. It is a move without precedent and rarely copied since. The second movement has been compared to Orpheus taming the wild beasts with his music. A lyrical and witty finale closes out this most subtle, suggestive, and multifaceted of Beethoven’s concertos.

“I shall never write a symphony!” Johannes Brahms once declared. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like to hear such a giant marching behind you.” The giant was Beethoven, and although his music provided essential inspiration for Brahms, it also set a high standard. In his First Symphony—fourteen years in the making—Brahms digested and purified Beethoven’s visionary achievement in the realm of the symphony. In so doing, he earned his own stripes as a symphonist, and with them the right to move forward as Beethoven’s truest heir.

From notes by James M. Keller and Michael Steinberg

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