Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy devoted to the string-quintet genre only two works sharing quite a few formal and musical similarities, though they were composed almost two decades apart.

In view of Mendelssohn’s strong revising obsession, the quintets pose some challenges to the editor: in the A-major quintet, after he replaced an inner movement and switched the order of the movements from the early version, a somewhat recognizable “final version” was published in 1833; the B flat-major quintet ...