JJ Knight & Jack Hunter Bareback in Birmingham

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is the second in a trilogy of concert overtures by Mendelssohn, the two others being A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Hebrides, the latter recorded on Vol. 1 in this Chandos series. Based on two poems by Goethe these sonorous images describe a ship helplessly becalmed in the open sea, then carried by rising winds towards land. The densely textured, immensely slow opening evocation of oceanic calm and the following quickening full-orchestral crescendo strikingly depict Goethe’s verses.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, hospitals were unfamiliar institutions to the inhabitants of most English towns and cities. As early as the late nineteenth century, however, hospitals had become central to both the provision of health care and medical education in most large urban population centres.