Britten and Mendelssohn

This program features a concert of incredibly delightful music, by two of history’s most popular composers, though the works themselves are rarely heard. Both pieces were written while the composers were barely out of their adolescent years, at the dawn of stellar careers. The great English composer Benjamin Britten was only twenty-one when he began composing his Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 6. During a visit to Vienna in which he immersed himself in the Viennese culture and reflected that inspiration in the final movement using the infamous meter of the city, the waltz. Sixteen was a banner year for Mendelssohn, during which he emerged from student status into a full-blown artist composing such works as his famous String Octet as well as this Piano Quartet in B minor, his third and final of his early piano quartets.