Classy musical time-travelling

Time travellers visiting the past in science fiction always have to have an eye on how their actions might change the future. Time travellers in music need have no such worries. Jörg Widmann’s Versuch über die Fuge (Attempt at the Fugue, an orchestral version of his Fifth String Quartet, with oboe joining the soprano voice from the original) is haunted by the Mozart Adagio and Fugue which precedes it here. A lithe, disciplined performance of Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, played on modern instruments with the lean-toned sensitivities of period instrument players, is followed by a shape-changing orchestration/re-writing of the Andante from Mendelssohn’s early Clarinet Sonata. Classy musical time-travelling.