"Felix Mendelssohn's surviving output for violin and piano comprises three sonatas, written between 1820 and 1838, thus spanning the mature phase of the composer's creative...

"Felix Mendelssohn's surviving output for violin and piano comprises three sonatas, written between 1820 and 1838, thus spanning the mature phase of the composer's creative life, and a handful of shorter apprentice pieces. They're all elegantly constructed and tuneful works that you'd think might have attracted a wider following on disc and in the recital room. Instead, Mendelssohn's violin triptych is seriously under-represented on CD, and most of the short pieces haven't been recorded at all, so this budget newcomer is long overdue. The performers, violinist Nicholas Milton, concertmaster of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and the Icelandic pianist Margrét Grímsdóttir, give strong, positive readings of these works on this nicely engineered Naxos issue. The student works, composed between 1819 and 1821, are basically composition exercises produced for Mendelssohn's teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter; but so were the miraculous String Symphonies, and these violin pieces are scarcely of lesser quality, with the two Fugues (in D minor and C minor) reflecting the young Mendelssohn's extraordinary skills as a contrapuntist. The Nomos Duo gives competent performances of these slighter offerings, and delivers tersely argued, forthright readings of the three mature sonatas."

--Michael Jameson