The April 2020 issue of BBC Music had a good article about the composer: Stephen Johnson, “Felix Mendelssohn, Composer of the Month" (112-116). Here are just a couple paragraphs.
"Mendelssohn had an extraordinary gift for tone painting. It isn’t just a matter of arresting details such as a somber changing religious processional in the Italian Symphony or the cavorting of Shakespeare’s Bottom rendered by the ophecleide in Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also the rich and powerful creation of broader mood pictures: the ominously still, deep ocean in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and the turbulent, moody sea in the magnificent Hebrides Overture. And it’s the mysterious, enticing gloom of Holyrood Palace in the Scottish Symphony and the Mediterranean sunlight bursting on a cold-chastened Northern European soul at the Italian Symphony’s opening….
"In an age that often confuses true innovation with attention-grabbing novelty there’s still a residual tendency to play down Mendelssohn’s achievement… How much less adventurous he seems—at first sight—than his radically lateral contemporary Robert Schumann. But some of Schumann’s later works show how much of a model Mendelssohn was in this respect: fire can burn fiercely and till be contained. The same is true for Schumann’s protégé Brahms, whose superb sequence of chamber works would have been unthinkable without Mendelssohn’s example—and it has to be admitted that Brahms’ marriage of form and feeling isn’t always quite as close to infallible as Mendelssohn’s...."
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