Richard Hickox Haydn London Vol. 1

Paavo Järvi and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (DKAM), who have won worldwide acclaim, including the 2023 Gramophone Magazine "Orchestra of the Year" and the 2024 German Classic Echo Award, have released the second installment of "Haydn: London Symphonies," featuring four of the composer's most mature masterpieces, including No. 94, known as "Surprise."

Paavo Järvi and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (DKAM), who have won worldwide acclaim, including the 2023 Gramophone Magazine "Orchestra of the Year" and the 2024 German Classic Echo Award, have released the second installment of "Haydn: London Symphonies," featuring four of the composer's most mature masterpieces, including No. 94, known as "Surprise."

Naxos began its Haydn series with his last four sonatas, perhaps to tempt listeners into investigating the series. Jenö Jandó, the house pianist for Naxos, has maintained a surprisingly high standard in his many previous recordings, but in Haydn he outdoes himself. He has obviously studied these pieces well, and he plays them as individual works, with intelligent and meaningful characterization of each and a good appreciation of Haydn's sparkling wit. This is indeed a good place to start investigating Haydn's piano sonatas, since each one on this disc is a masterpiece. But so are many of the others in this series.

The Penguin Guide (a classical cd review bible) gave this recording three stars, their highest rating. I agree (and was actually suprised to find that they had reviewed it). It has perfect sound and the performance is clean and lively and just-right sounding in terms of pacing and character. These are the earliest works Haydn composed (when he was 25), and they are full of creative melody and unique turns of phrase (and the classical music equivalent of 'hooks'), and also long, beautiful (often minor key) slow movements often reaching to and beyond 9 and 10 minutes in length.

These two last symphonies by Haydn (beautifully performed here) crown a lifetime of musical experimentation and orchestral mastery. No. 103, as the title implies, begins with a drum solo–a shocking innovation at the time, and one which "excited the deepest attention" in contemporary audiences. The creepy introduction reappears just before the end of the first movement, and it's a strategy that Haydn's pupil Beethoven immediately copied in his famous Pathetique Piano Sonata. The London Symphony had a longer reach still: The finale of Brahms' Second Symphony pays affectionate homage to one famous passage, but all of this music is just as valuable for itself as for its impact on later generations.

These two symphonies were composed for Haydn's second visit to London, during the winter months of 1794-95. He knew the musicians for whom he was writing, and they were a virtuoso ensemble. Therefore these are among the largest scaled, most technically demanding among all his symphonies.

This is part of a series of releases on the Naxos label devoted to the 40 symphonies of Michael Haydn, younger brother of Franz Joseph. These have been commercially successful, and it's easy to see why: there's music of unsuspected high quality here, and you can see why the younger Haydn's work was taken for Mozart's in several cases for decades, and why Mozart, who was spare in his praise of other composers, bestowed it upon this one. All four of these symphonies are in the three-movement form that Mozart had mostly left behind by the late 1770s and 1780s (when the Haydn works were composed), but the individual movements are quite confidently handled, with the elegant but harmonically wide-ranging slow movements perhaps the best of the lot.

This release from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under conductor Paavo Järvi inaugurates a new series of Haydn's 12 London Symphonies, the last works he wrote in the genre. These are popular works with no shortage of interpretations on the market, but Järvi's readings are distinctive, and the album landed on classical best-seller lists in the spring of 2023. Järvi places Haydn's characteristic humor in the context of high-intensity, high-energy readings. Consider the Trio of the Minuet in the Symphony No. 101 in D major ("The Clock"), where a remarkable rising flute figure rises to a ninth above the tonic, a move not really sanctioned by Classical-period harmony.

This is the first project in a seven-volume series exploring the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement, which swept through all art forms in the between the early 1760s and 1780s. The purpose of this movement were to frighten and perturb through the use of wild and subjective emotional means of expression.

Joseph Haydn the composer of symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, piano sonatas, and a plethora of other instrumental works was also Joseph Haydn the composer, director, and producer of operas. His employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, greatly enjoyed opera, and for nearly 20 years Haydn's full-time job was running the theater at Esterháza, the Prince's pleasure palace in Hungary. In the first decade, Haydn wrote 10 operas for his company, the most successful of which ran for 20 performances. In tone, they range from the comic to the semi-serious to the wholly serious, and in quality, they range between the operas of Gluck and Mozart.