Brendl Haydn Sonatas

It's not as if recordings of the 62 Piano Sonatas of Franz Josef Haydn are thick on the ground. Among the relative big names, there's Jeno Jando on Naxos and John McCabe on Decca. Among the less well-known names, there's Walid Akl on Koch Discover, Roland Batik on Camerata, Ronald Brautigam on BIS, Walter Olbertz on Berlin Classics, and Christine Schornsheim on Capriccio. And for those listeners with record players and aging memories, there's also the venerable Hungaroton cycle, the first complete recorded cycle, that coupled relatively well-known Hungarians like Zoltán Kocsis and Dezsö Ránki with nearly unknown Hungarians like János Sebestyén and the inimitable Zsuzsa Pertis.

Mikhail Pletnev was born in Archangelsk, which is located in the north of Russia on the coast of the White Sea. By the time Pletnev began piano studies at age seven, with pianist Julia Shaskina, his family had moved to the central Russian City of Kazan in Tatarstan. Pletnev demonstrated promise and was enrolled at age 13 in Evgeny Timakin's piano preparatory class at the Moscow Central Music School. At 14, Pletnev earned the Grand Prix awarded by the International Jeunesses Musicales in Paris, and at 15 he transferred into master classes headed by Yakov Flier at the Moscow Conservatory. /quote]

The survey by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet of Haydn’s piano sonatas reaches its conclusion with this eleventh volume. As in previous releases, the acclaimed pianist has mixed repertoire from different periods of Haydn’s career to create a recital of interest in its own right. Jean-Efflam notes: ‘It has been eleven years since the launch of this project to present Haydn’s sonatas, not in their chronological order, but as collections juxtaposing works from different periods. The programme for this final disc was actually the first one to be devised: I wanted to place side by side the very first and the very last sonata.

Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin has gained renown for his performances of hyper-virtuosic music from the nineteenth century, such as Alkan's Symphony for solo piano. The technically modest music of Haydn wouldn't have been on anybody's picks for what he might do next, but his two-CD selections of Haydn sonatas, of which this is the second, are delightful. His technical skills are on display in the zippy finales, taken at brisk clips with passagework executed with startling smoothness.

An album of Joseph Haydns (17321809) eight delightful early keyboard sonatas by Tuija Hakkila performed on two fortepianos. The current consensus is that there are about 60 surviving authentic Piano Sonatas by Haydn, while contemporary sources point to as many as 80. The earliest of these probably date from Haydns youth in the 1750s; the last one was completed in summer 1795. Some of the lost Sonatas are works that Haydn simply gave away as a young man, and they have never been heard of since. In mid-18th-century Vienna music was mainly distributed in the form of manuscript copies made by copyists. Haydn did not publish his first collection of six Sonatas until 1774. Of the Sonatas selected for this project, Haydn wrote all of these over a period of about 15 years before his 40th birthday.

After this preamble or subtle captatio benevolentiae, I will tell you that in 1992, at the age of ten, I gave my first public recital in the beautiful monastery of Santa Maria del Puig, founded no less than in 1240 near Valencia and where my parents had married in 1980. I could not have imagined that only seven years later I would go to live and study in New York and that Haydn would accompany me on that difficult journey as a fragile but permanent connection to my childhood… And in that 1992 recital, the main score of the evening was a Haydn Sonata, one of the ones I include on this CD: the Sonata in D Major Hob. XVI/14, which is so full of tenderness and of a serene bucolic-pastoral luminosity. It is an inner idyll of simple but sublime grandeur. And so began the red thread that represents Haydn in my life, a kind of locus amoenus (a pleasant place) where I have so often found, and continue to find, solace, consolation and shelter. In my childhood, everyone loved Mozart and Beethoven. Haydn was the ugly duckling. I always felt I was an ugly duckling and maybe that is also why I loved him so much from the beginning…

Naxos isn't recording Haydn's piano sonatas in order, but the first three volumes are all devoted to his late sonatas. These are generally shorter than the ones in Volume 1, which is why there are six sonatas here instead of four. Otherwise, the same comments apply to this disc as to the first. Just because Haydn's forms here are somewhat more compressed than in the last sonatas doesn't mean these are inferior pieces, just that they are shorter. And once again, Jenö Jandó never sounds as though he is just reading through the music; he knows each piece and gives it its own character.

The exquisite, classical balance evident in these six sonatas makes them rewarding examples of Haydn's exploitation of the piano's broad expressive range and rich textural variety. This volume in Jenö Jandó's complete edition presents these pieces in a compelling, moderninstrument version. For example, there's brilliance and sparkle in the opening movements of the D major and E flat Sonatas; warmth and dramatic intensity in the slow movements (most notably in the Baroque echoes of the Sonatas in C major and D major), and an appealing blend of wit and elegance in finales such as the third movement of the D major Sonata.

This is a disc of music by Turkish-born pianist Fazil Say – one can't really say by Haydn. It's hard to blame Say for his well-known antics, which most famously include humming along with something other than the melody. Modern marketing is all about filling niches, and the one once occupied by Glenn Gould is wide open. As with Gould, Say doubtless brings something important to music where he achieves a meeting of minds with the composer. But it doesn't happen with Haydn. The delicate balance of these earlier Haydn sonatas is shattered by Say's capricious shifts in tempo and accent and his far overwrought treatments of Haydn's deadpan, often neo-Baroque slow movements.