The genius of the adult Mendelssohn

To the Albert Hall on Friday for the all-Mendelssohn PROM concert given by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Mendelssohn has suffered through most of my lifetime for the mistaken belief that he was a genius as a child and teenager, but somehow lost it all as an adult. How wrong this is.

Certainly he was the most brilliant composer from a young age, even out-performing Mozart in childhood. But, as this concert showed so clearly, he retained his talent well into adulthood.

On Friday we were given two overtures – “Ruy Blas” and the more rarely performed “The Fair Melusine” – the Violin Concerto which the great fiddler Joachim described as “the heart’s jewel”, and his fifth symphony, the “Reformation". All of them were written in adulthood with an evolved, grown-up aesthetic, but no signs of decline.

So how did this reputation grow up? Probably it was the result of dreary, overblown performances. None of that was on view on Friday from the scintillating Leipzigers.

And how good to see a young Sydneysider, Tahlia Petrosian, among the violas. Is she the first Australian to play in that great orchestra since the teenage Alfred Hill in late 1880s?

On seeing and not seeing into the future

It’s always a risky business.

In the period before the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, I made several working trips to the various capital cities of Central and Eastern Europe.

Following a trip to Prague early in 1989, I came home and said to whomever would listen, “It’s going to be all over in months. They just need to push at the door”. And the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, happened just a few months later.

A few weeks after Prague, I made my first trip to East Berlin. Through Checkpoint Charlie, for a meeting of the board of directors of the International Advertising Association. After dinner, I went out walking the city with my dear friend, the late Michel Reinarz, communications boss of Nestlé.

All I could see were the telltale signs of an autocratic and repressive regime – policemen with sub-machine guns and German Shepherd dogs, barbed wire, watchtowers, floodlighting, the Wall. The whole kit. And no signs of life evident at all in this great capital city in the late evening.

So I went home and announced to colleagues that, in my opinion, it would be a decade or more before any real change would be possible there, so strong did the grip of the communists appear.

How wrong I was. Thousands started to leave East Germany and demonstrations sprung up – all without the benefit of today’s social networking – most famously in Leipzig. This was led by the chief conductor of the city’s legendary Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur. Just like in Prague, it was all over so quickly. And by November the first sections of the wall were demolished.

We can’t always predict the future with any accuracy. But still we have to try – to do the best we can. A problem is that there’s no evidence that politicians, journalists and senior managers are any better at this than the rest of us.

I miss Michel. He was a life-enhancer.