There is a peculiar trap waiting for anyone who ventures into Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words — forty-eight pieces across eight published books, plus a handful that never saw print in his lifetime, all of them brief, all of them ostensibly simple, all of them ruthlessly exposing. The simplicity is the trap. These are not easy pieces made to sound easy; they are fiendishly demanding pieces made to sound inevitable, and the distance between those two things is where pianists either prove themselves or quietly disappear.
Ronald Brautigam does not disappear.
What he does, on a Paul McNulty fortepiano built after an 1830 Pleyel, is something rarer than virtuosity — he makes music that sounds as though it could not have been played any other way. The first book’s opening piece, that deceptively busy A major, has the left hand churning away in near-perpetual motion while the right carries a singing line above it. Brautigam’s left hand is, in fact, extraordinarily busy. You barely notice. That’s the point.
Mendelssohn titled these pieces — or rather, he emphatically didn’t title most of them, resisting the programmatic labels that publishers and admirers kept trying to attach. He wanted the music to speak as music, not as illustration. He wrote to his sister Fanny that words were too specific, too limiting; the songs meant exactly what they sounded like and nothing else. Brautigam honors this. There’s no storytelling here, no reaching for significance. Just the long line, the shaped phrase, the cantabile ideal that Mendelssohn absorbed from Italian opera and then transfigured into something entirely his own.
The fortepiano matters more than it might seem. The instrument’s lighter action, its quicker decay, its tendency toward transparency rather than weight — all of this suits Mendelssohn’s texture in ways a modern concert grand sometimes can’t quite manage. A Steinway can make these pieces sound heavier than they are, can load the bass with a resonance Mendelssohn never imagined. The McNulty Pleyel keeps everything in proportion. It sings, genuinely sings, in a way skeptics of the fortepiano revival might not expect.
Among the period-instrument recordings of this repertoire, Brautigam’s takes its place near the top — above, I’d argue, some of the more celebrated modern-piano versions, and considerably more alive than the dutiful completists who treat the set as a cataloguing exercise. The pacing throughout the first four books runs slightly faster than some competitors, and what’s remarkable is that speed never sounds rushed. It sounds right. The pieces breathe at rendition tempo rather than practice tempo.
The five unpublished songs — composed between 1828 and 1837, omitted from many so-called complete recordings — deserve mention not just as curiosities but as music. They’re not juvenilia, not sketches. They’re Mendelssohn thinking out loud, and they fit naturally into the recorded sequence.
BIS’s sound is warm and present without being artificially close. There’s air around the instrument.
Brautigam has spent decades reexamining the keyboard repertoire from Mozart through Brahms on period instruments, and this release feels like the work of someone who has genuinely lived with these pieces — not prepared them, lived with them. The rubato is fractional, exactly judged. The delayed chord here, the slight give in a phrase there — these are the decisions of a artist who trusts the music completely. Mendelssohn, who died at thirty-eight having written more than most composers twice his age, would have recognized the instinct. Essential.
