In the middle of the 19th century, Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, aka his Second Symphony, was hugely popular. Nowadays it is rarely heard and fallen into the same obscurity as his other great outpourings of choral piety, the oratorios Elijah and St Paul. The composer himself had introduced the symphony to England in 1840 at the Birmingham Triennial festival, and it was a celebration of that connection that brought Richard Hickox, the Brighton Festival Chorus and the City of London Sinfonia to Symphony Hall for this performance.
It's a strange unwieldly piece. Any symphony with a choral finale composed in the 1830s must have Beethoven's Ninth somewhere in its background, but the similarities in this work are very superficial. Where Beethoven's Choral Symphony provides a choral finale to what is already a symphony on a unprecedentedly epic scale, this work is more like a rowdy cantata that has somehow picked up three orchestral movements.
There are links between the two parts, but it is a tasteful, rather than a blazingly intense work, more good manners than real substance. Hickox gave it the best possible chance, though, and his three soloists (sopranos Sarah Fox and Pamela Helen Stephen, both excellent, and tenor Steve Davislim, who seemed to be ailing) did everything that was required of them.
At that same 1840 festival, Mendelssohn also conducted his A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and appeared as soloist in his First Piano Concerto. Hickox began with the overture, not ideally precise and light-footed, while the teenage Lukas Vondracek was the concerto soloist. He is a Czech protege of Ashkenazy, and clearly a wonderful prospect, instinctively musical and technically faultless; there was a percussive edge to the piano sound, but that, I suspect, was more to do with the instrument than the pianist.
