this movement has been criticized as being sanctimonious. i'm not really sure mendelssohn had it in him to write anything bordering on irreverent, but i find this movement quite beautiful regardless of what he intended.
d major, the first and only theme is a choir-like hymn given by the strings in a sort of mini-rounded binary form, the second phrase with the winds exploring a bit of A Major before the strings yank it back into D major.
from 2:00 begins a short section. i'm really not sure why litton gets so much faster in this recording, i would prefer he just kept his former tempo and let the harmonies do the tension-building. but anyway, this section features a bit of an agitato string accompaniment with a little bit of anguished interjections from the winds.
this leads us into a restatement of the theme at 2:38 in the wrong key of A major (the accompaniment figure remains to give it a bit of a push). the difference here is that when he blossoms the theme, instead of a major predominant chord, we get a d minor chord (iv in a major). this requires us to take a bit of a detour so he introduces a bit of a new material to finish it. but since we are in the wrong key, he cadences in a surprise G7-C and takes some time to do a short development on the opening themes, over a gentle rolling accompaniment of thirty-second notes which will last until the end of the movement. this development lasts until 4:03 where finally he gets to bring back D Major with the delicious g minor chord at 4:13. he repeats all this material in the right key.
4:53 represents the big A7 chord which will allow us to cadence affirmatively in D Major, and he puts a punctuation on that with the big arpeggio in the violins at 5:15. coda begins right after this, and takes us to a cadence which concludes the sinfonia quietly and sets us up for the cantata to follow.
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