Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4 is one of 11 classical pieces for advanced orchestra included in Richard Young's Comprehensive String Pedagogy & Curriculum. A portion of the proceeds of sales for all CSPC music goes to support free music education at The People's Music School.

So what about the "Italian" symphony? What are the musical and technical challenges that deserve special mention? Perhaps the most obvious is that student performances of this work often tend to emphasize "passion" at the expense of discipline, clarity, and elegance. It's important to remember Mendelssohn's unique place in music history – as a bridge between the Classical and Romantic periods. A dense and sumptuous sonority that might be very effective in a Brahms symphony would not be appropriate for this Mendelssohn symphony whose structure and proportions are as "Classical" as anything Beethoven wrote in his early and middle periods. Similarly, it is questionable whenever conductors do grand ritards in this symphony when they are not written, and when they choose very different tempos for different sections of the same movement.
-Richard Young

Full program notes are included with the score. There are fingerings and bowings in all the string parts of every one of CSPC's pieces. These "cooked-in" technical solutions target the particular levels of the students. They are not just pragmatic but "musical."

Please note that due to a loss of source files, the PDF files of the music have been generated from scanned copies of printed parts. While every effort has been made to produce high quality parts, the limitations of scanning will result in some degradation of print quality.