Maxim Emelyanychev & SCO - Mendelssohn Symphonies - Pizzicato

Maxim Emelyanychev conducts both Mendelssohn symphonies on this album, the Third, the Scottish, and the Fifth, the Reformation, without pathos and above all without any heaviness. Lightness and slenderness seem to have been the motto. And the Scottish becomes much brighter than one has heard it with other conductors. The dynamically strongly differentiated final movement sounds particularly fresh and dance-like.

The conductor also remarkably ‘lightens’ the Reformation Symphony. He does not mystify and allows the effect to emerge without emphasis and without celebration from very refined music-making I have hardly ever heard the Reformation Symphony so plain, so simple, and yet so forceful.