Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No. 1 – Stadtfeld

There’s something almost defiant about a Bach specialist turning up with Mendelssohn — the composer who, more than any other, made Bach fashionable again for the nineteenth century, and who did it partly out of filial piety, partly out of genuine reverence. Martin Stadtfeld, still riding the credibility that came with winning the Leipzig Bach competition back in 2002, clearly knows exactly what he’s doing here. This is not a random detour. It is a pianist tracing a lineage.

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, op. 25, gets the big billing, and rightly — it’s the work most likely to lure listeners into the store, or these days onto the streaming platform, whatever we’re calling it this year. Mendelssohn wrote it fast, played it himself at the Munich premiere in 1831 at age twenty-two, and by all accounts had the King and Queen of Bavaria eating out of his hand within minutes. That kind of instant, unfussy charisma is exactly what the piece still needs from its soloist, and Stadtfeld has it. He doesn’t oversell the first movement’s stormy rhetoric — some pianists turn the opening Molto allegro con fuoco into something out of Liszt, all thunder and no wit, but Stadtfeld keeps the passagework light on its feet, articulated with a clarity you’d expect from someone who has spent years untangling Bach’s counterpoint.

The slow movement breathes. Marriner and the Academy give him room — no rushing, no coasting either, just an unforced Andante that lets the woodwinds sing without crowding the soloist’s line. And then that finale: a Presto that under Stadtfeld’s fingers has real sparkle, the kind of crisp, dancing energy that recalls (without imitating) the young Mendelssohn’s own quicksilver wit at the keyboard. Contemporaries said he improvised like a man possessed. You get a whiff of that here.

The Steinway itself deserves a mention — a Model D with a bloom to its upper register that the engineers have captured beautifully, warm without being swampy, present without spotlighting every hammer strike. Sony’s balance favors the piano, inevitably, but not at the expense of the orchestra’s color.

Where things get more interesting, oddly, is off the concerto entirely.

The Variations sérieuses, op. 54, is Mendelssohn at his most inward — written in 1841, a contribution to a charity album for a Beethoven monument, and shot through with a seriousness (the title isn’t ironic) that a lot of pianists misjudge, either wallowing in it or skating past it. Stadtfeld finds the tension between the theme’s andante sostenuto gravity and the increasingly virtuosic variations that follow without losing the work’s essential melancholy. The double-note variations have real bite. The fugal writing near the end — Mendelssohn never forgot his counterpoint lessons with Zelter — comes through with unusual transparency, voices audible where other pianists blur them into a wash of pedal.

The Songs Without Words selections are more of a mixed bag, though an enjoyable one. Ten of them here, cherry-picked across opus numbers rather than presented as a complete book, which is fine — nobody plays these complete anymore, not since the days when every parlor piano had a copy gathering dust. The E-flat major from op. 67 — the one nicknamed, unofficially, for its lark-like figuration — gets an airy, unforced reading. The C minor of op. 38 has appropriate weight and shadow. I found the “Reiterlied” in D minor a particular pleasure: Stadtfeld doesn’t overplay its galloping obviousness, keeps the wrists loose, lets the piece trot rather than gallop. Not every pianist resists the temptation to turn it into a circus act.

Is this a Mendelssohn concerto release to displace, say, Perahia’s classic account, or the more recent Bavouzet, or going further back to Serkin’s old broadcast performances? Probably not — Stadtfeld’s is a fine reading rather than a revelatory one, more polish than revelation. But paired with such thoughtful, unflashy accounts of the Variations sérieuses and the character pieces, this disc earns its place. It argues, gently, that Mendelssohn’s piano music deserves better than the faint condescension it still sometimes receives — the assumption that behind all that formal grace there’s nothing much simmering underneath.

There is. Stadtfeld finds it.