Grand Passions, High Ideals

Only the young Felix Mendelssohn could have taken a subject like the Reformation and turned it into music as radiant and as stirring as his Fifth Symphony. And perhaps only Vijay Iyer – described by The New York Times as ‘social conscience, multimedia collaborator, rhapsodist and multicultural gateway’ – could take the refugee testimonies of Human Archipelago and transform them into a cello concerto like no other. Music can do that, and Edward Gardner begins with the Overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser: an opera whose sensuality shocked 19th-century audiences, by a composer who was forced into exile for his political ideals.