Composers: Mendelssohn
Compositions: Overtures
Performers: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Edward Gardner
Catalogue Number: Chandos CHAN5235

Edward Gardner and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s enterprising Mendelssohn in Birmingham series reaches its fifth and final volume with an authoritatively played collection of overtures. A home from home for Mendelssohn in the last decade of his life, the UK’s ‘second city’ was the scene of several late triumphs for the composer. Here, its home-town band, the first British orchestra to be funded from the public purse 100 years ago this year, dispatches a potpourri program with utter conviction.

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