Conducted by PETER MONTGOMERY
CARMEN HILL (violoncello)
One summer, when Mendelssohn was twenty, he made a tour in Scotland. There, as he says in a letter home, the islands of the Hebrides affected him profoundly, and he records his impressions by jotting down the first twenty bars or so of what, a year later, was to become the overture now to be heard.
As a seascape, this tone picture is superb, and though it differs from Wagner's conception of the Sea, as in, for example, the Flying Dutchman Overture, Wagner acknowledged its truth and beauty, and he often asked for it to be played to him on the piano. ' Mendelssohn ', he said on one occasion, ' was a landscape-painter of the first order, and the Hebrides" overture is his masterpiece. Wonderful imagination and delicate feeling are here presented with consummate art.'