Like about half of Mendelssohn's sinfonias, or string symphonies, this one can easily be dispatched in under ten minutes. That should not imply that the piece is lightweight. It begins with a short, solemn Adagio—initially the sort of thing Mozart wrote in his youth, but containing a few of those Romantic, gently sighing phrases that characterize Mendelssohn's early scores. Then comes the meat of the Sinfonia, an ardent Allegro theme balanced by a less grim, more lilting subject, and then a stormy episode derived from a fragment of the first theme. Mendelssohn subjects the two more energetic motifs to a brief, vigorous development. Then, in what seems at first to be a conventional recapitulation, Mendelssohn allows the gentle second theme to break off distractedly, and plunges the strings into a long, breathless coda. The finale seems calculated to bring an audience to its feet, so it is odd that for some time this Sinfonia was regarded as perhaps a prelude to Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 12, with which it was originally bound.

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