We kick off our 2025 Summer Festival with the music of Felix Mendelssohn! Brilliantly precocious, Mendelssohn composed the two masterworks on this program in his mid-teens, ushering in an entirely new genre of chamber music in the process. As some of the first works written for larger chamber ensembles, the string octet has achieved legendary status among chamber musicians, while the piano sextet remains one of few attempts at this unique instrumental formation.