Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, and Tetzlaff in Adámek’s Thin Ice

About the Work

Thin Ice is Ondřej Adámek’s second violin concerto, and this performance is the first in Britain. It was written for Christian Tetzlaff, who gave the premiere in Paris on 8 February 2026 with the Orchestre National de France under Cristian Măcelaru, as part of Radio France’s Festival Présences. Within weeks he had played it again in Winterthur, with the composer conducting, and in Adámek’s native Prague. The London Symphony Orchestra is one of four commissioning partners, with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Musikkollegium Winterthur and the Orchestre National de France.

Adámek’s first violin concerto, Follow Me, was composed in 2017 for Isabelle Faust and told a story without words: a leader, a crowd that repeats what the leader says, and a crowd that finally turns on its guide. The new concerto is also a drama, but an inward one. In a note published by Boosey & Hawkes the composer says it is ‘built on the contrast between raw energy and the voice of remorse, conscience, or fate’. The soloist stands for the first of these, and for most of the piece something is pushing back.

The work lasts about twenty minutes and has four movements. Adámek describes the first as music in which ‘playfulness, exuberance, and inexhaustible energy frolic freely’, a carefree dance that gradually tips into chaos and ends ‘in a plunge into the abyss’. In the second, he writes, ‘spontaneity is buried alive’: the soloist is shut in a dark, airless space where a reproachful voice alternates with urgent cries. The third movement attempts an escape in what he calls ‘a quiet, whispered dance’, and it offers only the illusion of freedom. The finale brings the carnival mood back, ‘this time almost violently’, and sets it against the weight of conscience. The title comes from his last sentence: two forces that cannot be reconciled ‘wrestle on thin ice’.

Listeners who know Adámek’s music will expect the orchestra to behave unusually. His scores are full of sounds borrowed from speech and breathing and from musical traditions far from the concert hall, and they are driven by a strong, physical sense of rhythm. The orchestra here is of ordinary symphonic size, with piano, harp and three percussionists, but several wind players double on less familiar instruments, including slide flutes, contrabass clarinet and piccolo trumpet.

What to Listen For

Because the piece is so new, the composer’s outline is the best guide, and it is worth holding on to its two characters. One is the solo violin at play: fast, restless, dancing, unable to keep still. The other is whatever interrupts it. In the finale Adámek describes ‘defiant high gestures’ colliding with ‘a deep, stern motif’, so the conflict is laid out across the full height of the orchestra, high against low.

The opening movement sets the pattern. Listen for how long the exuberance lasts before a warning note creeps in underneath it, and for the point at which enjoyment turns into something closer to frenzy.

The two middle movements are the quiet ones, and they differ in kind. The second is tense and confined, with the violin alternately pleading and pretending to submit. The third is hushed in another way, a dance kept to a whisper that is broken off again and again.

In the last movement speed and repetition take over. Adámek speaks of acceleration building ‘toward a physical struggle’, and the ending does not announce a winner.

About the Work

In June 1840 Leipzig celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing with movable type. For a city that lived by the book trade this was a great civic occasion, and Mendelssohn, conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig’s leading musician, was asked for music. He wrote two pieces. The first was a Festgesang for men’s voices and brass, sung in the open air when the festival opened; one of its tunes was fitted after his death to the words of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’. The second was the Lobgesang, or Hymn of Praise, first performed on 25 June 1840 in the Thomaskirche, the church where Bach had been cantor.

Mendelssohn called it a ‘symphony-cantata on words of the Holy Bible’. Three orchestral movements, played without a break, lead into a long sequence of choruses, arias and duets for two sopranos, tenor, chorus, orchestra and organ. He assembled the text himself, mostly from the Psalms and Isaiah, and nowhere does it mention Gutenberg or printing. Its subject is thanksgiving and the passage from darkness into light, which suited a festival honouring the invention that had put the Bible into ordinary hands. The whole work grows from the words of the last verse of the last psalm: ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.’

A symphony that ends with voices could hardly avoid comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth, then only sixteen years old, and other composers of the time were trying out the same mixture; Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette dates from the year before. Mendelssohn’s plan differs from Beethoven’s, though. The vocal part is not a finale but well over half of the work, and the orchestral movements serve as a prelude to it.

The title ‘Symphony No. 2’ is not Mendelssohn’s. He published the work as Lobgesang, and the number was attached decades after his death by the editors of the collected edition, who needed to fill a gap in the sequence. It has nothing to do with chronology: the ‘Italian’ Symphony, published later as No. 4, had been performed seven years earlier. The current catalogue of his works lists the Lobgesang with his sacred music.

One part of the score is far better known than the whole: the harmonisation of the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ (‘Now thank we all our God’) found in many hymn books is the one he made for it.

What to Listen For

The very first sound is the key to the work: the trombones, alone, proclaim a broad, rising theme, and the full orchestra answers. Much later this theme turns out to be the tune to which the chorus sings ‘Alles, was Odem hat, lobe den Herrn’ (‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord’). It returns during the orchestral movements and again in the closing bars, so it frames the whole score.

The three orchestral movements run together. After the energetic first comes a lilting movement in a minor key, more a wistful song for the strings than a scherzo; in its middle section the winds intone a chorale-like melody while fragments of the opening motto pass through the texture. The slow movement that follows is marked ‘religioso’ and has the warmth of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words.

The voices enter with the motto theme, now with its words. Of the numbers that follow, the best known is the duet for the two sopranos with chorus, ‘Ich harrete des Herrn’ (‘I waited for the Lord’), a piece of great tenderness.

The dramatic centre comes next. The tenor sings of the snares of death and then asks, three times and each time more anxiously, ‘Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?’ (‘Watchman, will the night soon pass?’). The answer comes from a solo soprano, unaccompanied at first: ‘Die Nacht ist vergangen’ (‘The night is departed’). The chorus bursts in with the same words, and the darkness is over.

After that blaze Mendelssohn does something simple. The choir sings the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, its first verse with no instruments at all and its second with the orchestra moving around the tune. A duet for soprano and tenor leads to the final chorus, which gathers speed in a fugue and then, at the very end, brings back the trombones’ theme and the words that began the vocal part.