Mendelssohn-Hensel Fanny: Songs Volume 1

A gifted composer of some 500 works, mainly songs and small piano pieces, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel has been eclipsed by the fame of her younger brother Felix Mendelssohn. Yet her sensitivity in setting the German Romantic poets she loved, principally Goethe, Heine, Geibel and von Eichendorff, warrants greater attention. Like Clara Schumann, whose songs Dorothea Craxton has also recorded for Naxos (8570747), Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel possessed a distinct and richly powerful musical voice, by turns introspective, melancholic, delicate, lilting and serene – which deserves to be heard on its own terms.