On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we get a good start on 2019, with music by Felix Mendelssohn, bounding out of the gate at 16 years-old with one of the most astonishing works in the repertoire.

Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E-flat is the piece that established him as music’s foremost preternatural genius. Hear a 1960 performance from the legendary Marlboro Music Festival, featuring violinists Jaime Laredo, Alexander Schneider, Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violists Michael Tree and Samuel Rhodes, and cellists Leslie Parnas and David Soyer.

Holy smokes! In case you didn’t notice, the performers include the entire Guarneri String Quartet – which didn’t formally come together as a group until four years later, at Marlboro – and then some.

Of course, Mendelssohn was also the most important figure in the revival of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, at the age of 20 spearheading the first performance since Bach’s death of the “St. Matthew Passion.”

Equally important to Bach’s rehabilitation was Pablo Casals, who rediscovered Bach’s cello suites in a Catalan bookshop at the age of 13. Casals championed the pieces for the remainder of his days. Thanks to him, what had previously been regarded as dimly-recollected etudes are now standard repertoire.

Casals was affiliated with the Marlboro Music Festival from 1960 to 1973, the last 13 years of his life. We’ll hear Casals conduct Marlboro musicians in Bach’s Bradenburg Concerto No. 5. Flutist Ornulf Gulbransen, violinist Alexander Schneider, and pianist Rudolf Serkin are standouts in this 1964 recording. Serkin, of course, was the Marlboro Music School and Festival’s founding artistic director.

Begin the new year with inspirational performances of music by Bach and Mendelssohn – a surefire balm for the back-to-work blues – on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Pablo Casals, Alexander Schneider, and Rudolf Serkin will feature prominently on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.”