Fanny Mendelssohn: Das Jahr

Sokoli, Gaia

PCL 10296

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel (1805-1847) still awaits a full appreciation of her legacy as a composer. Four years the elder of her brother Felix, she shared his rich cultural education.

Like him, she studied piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Karl Zelter, who introduced her to Baroque polyphony and Classical-era forms. In maturity, however, Fanny was compelled – not least by Felix himself – to suppress her muse for the sake of fulfilling ‘womanly’ duties to the home and the family, especially once she had married the painter Wilhelm Hensel in 1829. She continued nonetheless to write music in the ‘private’ realm of piano and chamber pieces, supported and encouraged by her husband.

Following a Piano Classics album dedicated to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s piano sonatas, Gaia Sokoli addresses perhaps her most individual work for piano. She pairs the cycle of Das Jahr with three Charakterstücke from 1846, never previously recorded. The form of Das Jahr - 12 character-pieces, each dedicated to a month of the year, concluding with a Postlude - is a novelty, later followed by Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons.

Brilliantly played by young Italian pianist Gaia Sokoli, whose previous recording of Fanny Mendelssohn received glowing 5-star reviews in the international press.

CD x 1

Piano Classics

12/2/24

5029365102964