Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: |Lobgesang Symphony no. 2

While Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony culminates in a festive setting of the words “Freude, schooner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium”, Mendelssohn’s no less monumental Second Symphony, the “Lobgesang” or “Hymn of Praise,” is built around the words of the psalm “Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den Herrn.” What Mendelssohn himself called a “Symphonie-Kantate to words taken from the holy scriptures” was not just his answer to Beethoven’s Ninth, but a hymn of praise in its own right, composed in honour of the 400th anniversary of the invention of book printing by Johannes Gutenberg, which is why it was premiered at a celebration to mark that occasion in the Thomaskirchen Leipzig on June, 25th 1840. This rendering of the work by Karl-Friedrich Beringer, the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Philharmonic and the Windsbacher Knabenchor, truly is a hymn of praise.