The Marionette Theatre

The Salomon's beautiful playing of these important masterpieces make this set indispensable. The dedication, beauty and vitality of the interpretations are of the highest order … a Haydn monument as important to the 90s as the one by the Pro Arte was to the 30s.

The Salomon's beautiful playing of these important masterpieces make this set indispensable. When Haydn completed his Opus 20 String Quartets in 1772 he was in his fortieth year and was on the brink of international fame. Since 1761 he had been in the service of the Esterházy family at their castle in Eisenstadt, east of Vienna, or, after the mid-1760s, mainly at the palace of Eszterháza, over the present-day border with Hungary on the other side of the Neusiedlersee.

Haydn composed more than twenty operas, mainly for the sumptuous theatre at Eszterháza, the palace of his long-time employers, the princes of Esterházy. Even so, his work in the operatic field remains largely neglected. This disc focuses on an even more closely guarded secret: the so-called 'insertion arias' that Haydn wrote for inclusion in operas by other composers. The rarely, if at all, recorded music includes Haydn's three contributions to La Circe, an opera pasticcio which combined music by several composers, and six of the surviving insertion arias. Among these is Infelice sventurata, written for an opera by Cimarosa, and one of Haydn's finest arias, here movingly performed by Miah Persson. The Swedish soprano shares the greater part of the programme with the Swiss tenor Bernard Richter.

The pairing of Igor Stravinsky's ballets Petrushka (1911) and Jeu de cartes (1937) may afford insights into his development of neoclassical style, which was anticipated in the former work and stated fully in the latter. Indeed, the bright and tuneful music of both ballets tends toward playfulness, clever parody, and colorful scoring, all characteristic of neoclassicism, and the scenarios – a marionette that comes to life in Petrushka, and the personification of playing cards in Jeu de cartes – suggest a further connection, perhaps even to Stravinsky's notions of musical objectivity.