What’s Interesting About This Concert

• The Overture in C Major is the only work Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel wrote for orchestra alone. Scholarly research dates the composition as likely from 1830-32, which would make its composer 25-27 years old (for reference, 1830 was the same year her brother composed his Reformation symphony, his second completed symphony but published and known as his Fifth). Fanny herself was the conductor at the premiere.

• In the final decades of the eighteenth century, manufacturers were beginning to stretch the piano’s range by incorporating keys beyond the instrument’s standard five-octave range. Beethoven was not always among the first to make use of these extra notes; doing so, after all, would have limited the practicality of his music for musicians whose pianos were not so equipped. But in his C minor Piano Concerto, he made full use of the new technology, and he asks his soloist to play all the way up to high G. This concerto, in fact, is thought to be the first piano piece ever to call for that particular note!

• Donald Francis Tovey’s in his Essays in Musical Analysis (which appeared in 1935), wrote: “I have no hesitation in setting Dvořák’s [Seventh] Symphony along with the C major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms, as among the greatest and purest examples of this art-form since Beethoven”.