In some ways, Mendelssohn may be classed with his 'romantic' nineteenth-century colleagues, for to take just one area of his work, the delicate pictorialism and sentimentality of his Songs without Words clearly belongs to that time. Yet his art also embraced the past, and his revival of Bach's music symbolized his deep reverence for tradition. Furthermore, no other important composer of his time contributed as much to the repertory of the organ, an instrument which to most people then seemed principally associated with liturgical music. He played it with skill, and wrote worthily for it.
John Scott's recital on the St Paul's Cathedral organ does not offer everything Mendelssohn wrote for the instrument, but includes the major areas of it in the shape of the six sonatas (1844-5) and the earlier Preludes and Fugues (1837). The two discs begin with the Preludes and Fugues, but thereafter the various works are not chronologically arranged. Nor are the organ sonatas all together, No. 4 (on the second disc) being separated from No. 5 by five shorter pieces and the Allegro in B flat major intervening between Nos. 5 and 6. Perhaps this doesn't matter; at any rate, the second disc also includes two movements in D major (the Andante in that key and the Allegro, Chorale and Fugue) which, according to the useful booklet essay, were candidates for inclusion in the D major and D minor Sonatas, Nos. 5 and 6.
The music itself is competently written. But it is in a heavily archaic style with much earnest (not to say plain dull) contrapuntal writing and treatments of chorale melodies, and a million miles away from the vital and transparent invention of the Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music or the Violin Concerto. Indeed, the Prelude of the C minor Prelude and Fugue seems quite relentlessly loud and thick, as recorded here on a big Victorian-sounding instrument in the notoriously reverberant St Paul's acoustic. The same must be said for much of what follows, and although I admire John Scott's skill in encompassing the notes, I long for more variety of tone and clearer textures than we hear in, for example, the wearisomely loud Fugue of the D minor Prelude and Fugue. Even a quieter piece such as the gentle Adagio of the First Sonata has a foggy, inexpressive sound, and in the following recitative the reverberation after every forte makes the music hard to grasp; the Andante religioso of the Fourth Sonata is also vague judged as a musical statement. The specification of the instrument given in the booklet suggests that better management of tone, dynamics and texture would have been possible. Naturally, an organist must confine registration to what he feels to suit the music and the venue, but I confess to finding this two-disc set too monotonous to be enjoyable.'