For those who believe that Liszt and Chopin were the best pianist of their time...Read this:
Many people witnessed Mendelssohn's piano playing and, as Donald Mintz has pointed out, there is a remarkable consensus among the reports of it. Mendelssohn's playing possessed "enormous dexterity, great accuracy, a feeling of fire, and passionate involvement." Apart from his own music, Mendelssohn's public repertory was relatively limited, but within those pieces he was a quite insightful and accomplished interpreter. He seems always to have been able to rouse audiences to a frenzy through his playing, but less because of his virtuosity as such than because his playing brought audiences face to face with the music he played.
One of the features of Mendelssohn's public performances as a pianist involved his abilities as an improviser. This was particularly noted in England late in his life when during a rehearsal he improvised three different cadenzas for the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto, and then played yet a different one at the concert. Unlike many improvised cadenzas of that time, Mendelssohn's were firmly based on the motivic content of the movement.
Although Mendelssohn's playing and compositional style were relatively conservative, there exists one recollection that shows him capable of more advanced feats. Once when Liszt played a Hungarian melody and four increasingly dazzling variations on it for an assembly that included Mendelssohn, Liszt then demanded that Mendelssohn play something as well. After resisting for a while on the grounds that he no longer played much, Mendelssohn finally agreed on condition that Liszt would not be angry with him for what he was about to do-whereupon he sat down and played Liszt's melody with variations that he had just heard for the first time, note for note! Liszt was too impressed to be angry, even though in achieving his feat Mendelssohn had had to imitate some of Liszt's showman-like "raptures."
The first great piano work by Mendelssohn was his Andante and Rondo capriccioso, op. 14. Its opening section is filled with magical intimacy of expression, while the rest of the piece is a virtuoso romp of elfin lightness that is quite difficult to play. Edvard Grieg, who studied at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music about twenty years after Mendelssohn founded it, tells the story of a professor of piano there. Because of Mendelssohn's role in the history of the conservatory, it was customary for students to study his works faithfully, but this Rondo was beyond the grasp of many of them. When they would ask this professor for a demonstration of how one could make one's way through the piece, the man (named Wenzel) would play through the Andante in a most expressive manner, get to the Rondo, and say "Et cetera."
This story gets to the core of one of the challenges in playing Mendelssohn's music. So much of it goes at an extremely rapid rate and the performer must learn to play many notes quickly and lightly, with emphasis on momentum rather than expressive inflection. This is unlike the style of performance demanded by much other music, however, and very unlike the kind of style practiced in the twentieth century, which prefers tangibility to evanescence. Nevertheless, many of Mendelssohn's fast works make better sense at tempos that are faster and lighter than most performers are prepared to achieve. Could it be that this discrepancy between performance style and Mendelssohn's music is one of the reasons Mendelssohn seems difficult to revive in our day?
Topic: Felix Mendelssohn as a Pianist