Mendelssohn The Masterworks Brilliant Classics

To determine the worth of this 40-disc set called Mendelssohn: The Masterworks, let's assign values to each disc on a scale of one to ten and then add up the total. To start with, there are 10 discs of Mendelssohn's complete choral works with Nicol Matt leading the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Since these performances are uniformly well sung and directed and possess an uncommon amount of enthusiasm for the recherché repertoire, let's give them eight points each for a total of 80 points.

The pianist Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991) belonged to that tradition of German musicians – notably including conductors such as Furtwängler, Klemperer and Walter – for whom composition was hardly less essential a component of their musical personalities than performing, even if it was an activity they largely undertook privately. Working day to day with imperishable masterworks by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, they did not expect to meet such standards, yet their own creative voices required an outlet through more than recreation of others. Left cold by the musical innovations and developments of their own time in the work of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, they wrote in a heightened Romantic idiom, and in genres – especially song and chamber music – which lay separately from their own professional activity as performers.