DOHNÁNYI 150, BRAHMS AND MENDELSSOHN

In the same year as he composed his Symphony No. 1 in C minor (1824), the fifteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy also wrote a Notturno. Two years later, he had to write a new version after the original score was lost. In 1838, he published the work as his Overture for Wind Instruments with substantially expanded orchestration.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Ernő Dohnányi established himself as the most important Hungarian pianist since Franz Liszt and one of the most celebrated soloists in the world. He regarded Johannes Brahms as one of his main compositional models and won Brahms’s admiration with his Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 1. His Violin Concerto No. 2 (1949–50) was written in the tradition of the great Romantic violin concertos, enriched by an unmistakably Hungarian flavour. From 1857 to 1859 Johannes Brahms worked in Detmold as a teacher, pianist and choirmaster. It was there that he composed his Serenade No. 1 in D major, originally conceived as a nonet. On the advice of his friend Joseph Joachim, however, he reworked it for symphony orchestra.