These pleasant, but somewhat trivial and meandering works from Mendelssohn's adolescence demand little of performers other than a certain rhythmic buoyancy in the quicker music, and sympathetic warmth in the slow movements. These qualities are very well supplied by Lev Markiz and his admirable players throughout the new disc, and the recording is certainly very impressive in possessing both clarity and tonal opulence within an ideally balanced acoustic.
BIS's issue is subtitled ''The Complete String Symphonies—Volume 1'', so we may expect two more CDs to make up a set. This will rival the existing complete surveys by Ross Pople and William Boughton. Nimbus's set, available on three separate discs, but coupled differently from the sequence listed above, suffers a little from occasional lapses in the playing and an over-reverberant recording acoustic. Hyperion's performances are now only available as a complete set: here the quality of recording is not quite so strikingly good as the engineering on BIS's new issue, but Pople's lively, well-disciplined performances are pretty well on a par with those of Markiz.
Those who wish to sample the string symphonies should investigate this new BIS disc, and they will still have the option of completing the survey in due course if they so wish. There are no direct single disc comparisons.'