The question we're exploring: What good is a "symphonic adagio" anyways? Like, what can one of 'em do for us? -- Part 1

[1] WE KNOW THE ARCHETYPAL SYMPHONIC ADAGIO,
BUT HERE ARE SOME DIFFERENT WAYS OF HEARING IT

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Vienna State Opera, September 1979

Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, cond. Berlin Classics, recorded in the Lukaskirche, Apr. 1979 & Mar. 1980

Budapest Symphony Orchestra, Tamás Vásáry, cond. Hungaroton, recorded live in the Concert Hall of the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, June 26, 1997

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Apr. 21-22, 1961

New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. New York Philharmonic Special Editions, recorded live in Avery Fisher Hall, Dec. 31, 1999

Even if you're dead sure that back in the day "adagio" didn't mean
all that slow, you can still make some kind of statement --

Tonhalle Orchestra (Zürich), David Zinman, cond. Arte Nova, recorded in the Tonhalle, Dec. 12 & 14, 1998

[NOTE: It happens that the performances are arranged from longest to shortest. Is there anything to be made of this? Hint: Might it be not so much "getting better" or "getting worse" as working differently? -- Ed.]


[2] IN FACT, THERE HAVE BEEN SYMPHONIC ADAGIOS
ALMOST AS LONG AS THERE HAVE BEEN SYMPHONIES

Hungarian Chamber Orchestra, Vilmos Tátrai, solo violin and leader. Hungaroton, recorded 1965

Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, cond. Sony, recorded in the Mercedes Benz Center, Stuttgart, between 1995 and 2006

Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer, cond. Nimbus-Brilliant Classics, recorded in the Haydnsaal of the Esterházy Palace, Eisenstadt, Austria, Apr.-May 2001

Orchestra of St. Luke's, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded in the John Harms Center for the Arts, Englewood, NJ, Nov. 8-9, 1988

[NOTE: Here our timings are affected by repeats. There are two, which together would cause the whole movement to be repeated. Vilmos Tátrai, probably best known as founder and first violinist of the great Tátrai Quartet, takes no repeats (and how much, really, do we miss them?) in the gorgeous sort-of-"luxuriant adagio" Hungarian Chamber Orchestra performance, where he plays the quicksilver violin solos; Dennis Russell Davies and Adam Fischer take the first repeat but not the second, meaning that Fischer's pace is kind of a quickstep adagio; and Sir Charles M. takes both repeats. -- Ed.]


[3] SO WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A SYMPHONIC ADAGIO?
Hmm, is there anything else in music like this one-two punch?

Rapid hits: Part 1 of 3 --

(1) MEDIC NEEDED FOR VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S LARK? [Oct. 9]
(2) ONE SOLOIST, MULTIPLE VIEWS OF VW'S LARK [Oct. 10]
(3) A WHOOSH OF MEMORY OF AN EPIC CLARINET GUY [Oct. 11]


(1) WHO LOVES A WHEEZING, WHINY, OR ASTHMATIC LARK?

While harking unto our musical larks, as I played with Haydn's I tripped over a snag that had somehow never caught me. -- Ken

Group I -- performances I own which share a particular oddness


Paul Robertson, violin; with the rest of the Medici Quartet (David Matthews, violin; Paul Silverthorne, viola; Anthony Lewis, cello). EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, London, Jan. 16, 1976

István Kertész, violin; with the rest of the Festetics Quartet (Erika Petöfi, violin; Péter Ligeti, viola; Rezsö Pertorini, cello). Harmonia Mundi France, recorded in the Unitarian Church of Budapest, June-Dec. 1991

Simon Standage, violin; with the rest of the Salomon Quartet (Micaela Comberti, violin; Trevor Jones, viola; Jennifer Ward Clarke, cello). Hyperion, recorded Oct. 11-13, 1995

Hubert Buchberger, violin; with the rest of the Buchberger Quartet (Julia Greve, violin; Joachim Etzel, viola; Helmut Sohler, cello). Brilliant Classics, recorded in the Evangelische Burgkirche Nieder-Rosbach, Germany, May 17-19, 2007

Group II, or shall we say: (a) "Subgroup II-A"

Among others, some singing larks of the nonverbal kind are here to wish everyone: Happy New Year! (quick version)

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM VIENNA -- FIRST BY WAY
OF NEW YORK -- AND, OH YES, FROM MUNICH TOO


[in English, lyrics by Howard Dietz] Lily Pons (s), Adele; Ljuba Welitsch (s), Rosalinde; Charles Kullman (t), Eisenstein; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Dec. 24 & 29, 1950 & Jan. 7, 1951

[in English, lyrics by Howard Dietz] Patrice Munsel (s), Adele; Marguerite Piazza (s), Rosalinde; Charles Kullman (t), Eisenstein; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Live performance, Jan. 20, 1951

Edita Gruberová (s), Adele; Kiri Te Kanawa (s), Rosalinde; Wolfgang Brendel (b), Eisenstein; Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. Philips, recorded in the Musikverein, November 1990

Erika Köth (s), Adele; Hilde Gueden (s), Rosalinde; Waldemar Kmentt (t), Eisenstein; Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, June 1960
And here's an actual New Year's Eve performance:

Carol Malone (s), Adele; Gundula Janowitz (s), Rosalinde; Eberhard Wächter (b), Eisenstein; Bavarian State Orchestra, Carlos Kleiber, cond. Live performance from the Bavarian State Opera (Munich), Dec. 31, 1974
[NOTE: More than a third of this clip is applause. I was all set to snip it out, but even 48 years after the fact I just couldn't strip away the performers' earned plaudits. -- Ed.]

[We'll be hearing the full version of this trio in the follow-up expanded-coverage version of this post scheduled for tomorrow. -- Ed.]

NOW, HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM HAYDN'S LARK

Fledermaus of course is meat-and-potatoes (or maybe we should say champagne-and-caviar?) New Year's material, and we've got more of it in tomorrow's expanded post, but it occurred to me that in a New Year's frame of mind we might finish up our business with at least the nonvocal contingent of the musical larks we've been pursuing, starting with Haydn's -- in two really lovely and interestingly different performances (one of which we're going to hear in its entirety in a moment). -- Ed.

Geoff Nuttall (1965-2022)

"Geoff was an inspired artist whose loyalty to his chosen passions and people was legendary. . . . Geoff had an energetic and spiritual connection to music that rubbed off on anyone lucky enough to witness him play."

-- from a statement by Geoff's St. Lawrence String Quartet-mates,
reported in an Oct. 20 news post on the website of The Strad
(you can read the full statement on the SLSQ website)

The St. Lawrence String Quartet (violinists Geoff Nuttall and Owen Dalby, violist Lesley Robertson, and cellist Christopher Costanza) plays the first movement, Allegro con spirito, of Haydn's Quartet in G minor, Op. 20, No. 3, in Stanford University's Bing Concert Hall. (The May 2017 YouTube posting says, "The complete Op. 20 will be made available online for free.")

If you watch the intense Haydn Op. 20, No. 3 clip (above), which accompanies the obituary from the esteemed chronicle of all things string-instrment-related, The Strad (below), and read in the obit what all Geoff Nuttall was up to in his crowded musical life, I think it will strike you too that 56 was way too early for his departure. Kindest thoughts to his families both actual and musical.-- Ken

Just so you know what we're up to: Three familiar larks, a bonus lark, and (oh yes!) Death and a maiden

Alauda (the Eurasian or Oriental skylark)

"[Larks] have more elaborate calls than most birds, and often extravagant songs given in display flight. These melodious sounds (to human ears), combined with a willingness to expand into anthropogenic habitats -- as long as these are not too intensively managed -- have ensured larks a prominent place in literature and music, especially the Skylark in northern Europe and the Crested Lark and Calandra Lark in southern Europe." -- Wikipedia

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The Lark Ascending (romance for
violin and orchestra)

Jean Pougnet, violin; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Oct. 21, 1952

Hugh Bean, violin; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Mar. 1, 1967

[NOTE: Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) of course had a warm relationship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and remains for me on the whole his most persuasive recorded exponent. And much as I love the more spacious and colorful 1967 recording (which was my first Lark Ascending), with a suitably engaged performance of the solo violin part by New Philharmonia concertmaster (among his wide range of musical activities) Hugh Bean (1929-2003), I'm happy to have as well the more streamlined 1952 one, which though mono still sounds awfully good, and has a really subtly inflected solo performance by Jean Pougnet (1907-1968), whose unsummarizably diverse personal and professional history is worth looking into. -- Ed.]

by Ken

A couple of further projects cropped up in last week's, er, post, "Taking our good old time with the Gabrieli String Quartet." Yes, I know, I'm still supposed to be going over the whole thing to make a proper post out of all the ingredients, and I really, really still mean to -- any day now, or maybe any week. What mattered most to me was that the music was, or at least should have been (I make no assumptions about what's there till I muster the courage to look at it), all in place.


FIRST, WE'RE IN THE GRIP OF . . . LARKMANIA!

Quite right, Sir Georg: We'll need to hear not just Haydn's orchestral depiction of "pre-Creation" chaos but the "breathtaking" explosion when suddenly "there was light!"

[PLUS: Some serial aural remembrances of Kurt Moll]

[MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: Now with various sorts of upgrading, to bring the post a tiny bit closer to what I'd hoped to make -- notably fleshing out the section of Moll archival clips, with English text added, along with minimal comments and some non-Moll performances]

CHORUS: "Und es ward licht!" ("And there was light!")
[from "The First Day," in Part I of Haydn's Creation]

"I can think of no other work by any composer in which a single chord comes as such a surprise." -- Georg Solti (see below)

Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, June 1986

Stockholm Radio Chorus, Stockholm Chamber Chorus, Berlin Philharmonic, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, December 1987

Chicago Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live in Orchestra Hall, Oct. 29-30 & Nov. 2, 1993

"A personal note by Sir Georg Solti" -- from the CD booklet for his 1993 re-recording of Haydn's Creation

The older I get, the more deeply I love the genius of Haydn, especially his two late oratorio masterpieces, The Creation and The Seasons.

In re-recording The Creation, I was struck by the incredible modernity as well as the startling originiality of so much of the score. To mention just two examples: the opening "Representation of Chaos," with music that so poignantly symbolizes the emptiness and hopelessness before creation; and, immediately thereafter, the breathtaking C major of "Light." I can think of no other work by any composer in which a single chord comes as such a surprise. How completely I can understand the reactions at the first public performance, as my friend Robbins Landon so well describes in his article [a reprint in the CD booklet of a long, wide-ranging background piece by the great Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon].

I was joined in my excitement and passion for this work by all my colleagues, soloists, orchestra and chorus alike. Rarely can I recall such exuberant joy and sheer enchantment as we shared during these Chicago concerts. I hope this will come across to the listener.

[Note: In the first paragraph I've taken the shocking liberty of reversing the order of Sir Georg's reference to the great late-Haydn oratorios, so that The Creation comes before The Seasons, as they did in real life. Is it possible that an editor suggested this to him c1994? I don't think so; I think he'd not only have approved but been grateful. Now I'm afraid it's too late to ask. -- Ed.]

by Ken

I was surprised how moved I was re-encountering this "personal note" from Georg Solti (1912-1997) about his experience re-recording Haydn's Creation -- days after his 81st birthday. In that late period of his life he memorably re-recorded a number of big vocal works that were clearly close to his heart, some of which had gone just fine in his earlier efforts -- I think in particular of Mozart's Così fan tutte and Magic Flute and Verdi's Falstaff; the latter two, notably if possibly coincidentally, are works that as a fledgling conductor in the 1930s he had helped Arturo Toscanini prepare at Salzburg) -- and others, at least to me, not so fine, like Mozart's Don Giovanni, Wagner's Meistersinger, Verdi's Otello -- and The Creation. (Among those happy late-life "big works" recording projects we should note as well Sir Georg's companion recording, this one his first ever, of Haydn's final "big work," The Seasons.)

What's so moving about Solti's Creation note is that it rings so true. "The older I get, the more deeply I love" declarations are so common as to be commonplace as applied to, say, Mozart, but Haydn [seen here as sculpted on the Frieze of Parnassus, encircling the base of London's Albert Memorial -- from the blog London Remembers], not so much. In fact, real imaginative identification with Haydn isn't common at all. A lot of performers you sense approach Haydn's music as kind of like Mozart's only not quite -- an approach that hardly ever works. We can talk about this more after we've heard today's Creation clips.

For those who weren't here for yesterday's preview post ("I won't go out on a limb and say this is the most beautiful bass voice I've ever heard, or this the most beautiful minute-and-a-half of singing. Then again --"), the explosions of light we "heard" above are from the same recordings of The Creation I teased therein, offering their accounts of the remarkable hushed lines uttered by the angel Raphael -- the first singing heard in the oratorio, Haydn's setting of some of the most famous words in the human record, the opening of the Book of Genesis.

The plan for today, in addition to filling in the somehow-missing performer identifications (notably of the bass soloists), was to fill in Haydn's introductory orchestral depiction of the chaos out of which the world would be created. Now in addition, inspired by Sir Georg's personal note, I've realized we also have to continue on a few extra minutes, to hear God conjure up light. I've remade the ready-made audio clips accordingly.

While we wait for the production of splendid new Sunday Classics posts, let's pause for a four-minute miracle

PROBABLY-NOT-BY-HAYDN*: Serenade (ii. Andante cantabile,
from String Quartet in F, Op. 3, No. 5)
[*As I put it in the amended title I assigned when I rejiggered the Internet Archive page for this clip (which we've heard before -- just don't ask me when, unless you really want to know): "Haydn's authorship of the six Op. 3 quartets is much disputed, but the alternate attribution to the monk Romanus Hofstetter is no slam dunk either."]

Yes, it's our old pals the Janáček Quartet (Jiří Trávníček and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Jiří Kratochvíl, viola; and Karel Krafka, cello; recorded May 1963) offering four minutes' worth of musical magic, from one of the most beautiful records I know. (Above we see the original British Decca LP jacket.)

by Ken

MONDAY UPDATE: I mentioned in the original version of this post that I had originally it was going to begin with a course of chatter having to do with how I happened on this subject. This has actually now happened -- see the "ON SECOND THOUGHT" Monday update down below, in the section "NOW, WE WANT TO HEAR THE WHOLE QUARTET, NO?"

All the same, the basic plan remains just to listen, with the proviso that this music -- actually, the entire set of six quartets that came to be known as Haydn's Op. 3 -- probably isn't by Haydn. Or then again, just possibly it is. And then still again, just to complicate things further, for reasons much too arcane to try to go into, it has been plausibly argued that the handy alternative attribution to the monk Romanus Hofstetter is just as unlikely. As far as I know, there the matter stands, and barring some startling document discovery (never out of the question!), we're never going to know any better than we do now!

But for us gathered here today, no matter! This seemingly simple, but in reality extraordinarily tricky, movement from Op. 3, No. 5, the movement that has always commandeered attention directed to the set, and it should already be obvious why: In the whole realm of music I've never heard anything like it. Maybe it's just one violin singing away at its infinitely expanding (and sometimes contracting) little song -- singing all the way through, note, with its mute in place, while the other violin, the viola, and the cello, pluck their fingers away in accompaniment -- is, well, pure magic. It would of course be ridiculously unscholarly to venture that it's too wonderful not to be by Haydn, but of course that argument doesn't have a leg to stand on.

(By the way, as long as we're thinking about that mute the violinist slaps on his instrument, we might note that the composer has done something interesting here. The quartet began in F major, and by using the utterly common device of pitching the second movement in the dominant key it winds up in C major, a pretty happy key tonally -- it practically radiates sunshine, and an especially happy key for string players. Except that the composer has gone and muted his singing violin and taken his playmates' bows away altogether. Really simple, right?)


BUT WAIT, THERE'S STILL MORE TO BE HEARD

Sunday Classics snapshots: Swinging Haydn with Vilmos Tatrai playing and conducting

Violinist and conductor Tátrai (1912-1999)

Symphony No. 31 in D (Horn Signal) (1765):
i. Allegro

Symphony No. 73 in D (La chasse) (The Hunt) (1782):
iv. Presto

Hungarian Chamber Orchestra, Vilmos Tátrai, cond. Hungaroton, recorded 1965

by Ken

So I noticed this CD lying atop one of the millions of piles of CDs I've finally been trying to organize, and it didn't instantly ring a bell: a pair of D major sort of hunt-themed Haydn symphonies -- the Horn Signal, No. 31, and La Chasse, No. 73, performed by the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Vilmos Tátrai. Above we've heard the movements most responsible for the symphonies' nicknames (though it should be noted that the then-overwhelming contingent of four horns is used throughout the Horn Signal Symphony).


MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT THE CD WAS LYING ABOUT --

Sunday Classics report: The Schneider Quartet's legendary Haydn recordings finally make it to CD

The cover of the booklet accompanying the indispensable Music and Arts CD reissue of the legendary not-quite-complete 1951-53 Haydn Society cycle of the Haydn string quartets by the Schneider Quartet

by Ken

For decades now it has been one of the gaps in the ranks of available recordings, through much of the LP era and, until now, the whole of the CD era. But this month Music and Arts has released a specially priced 15-CD set of the 54 Haydn quartets recorded by the Schneider Quartet in the early '50s, "newly remastered mostly from the original master tapes." The massive project was spearheaded by company founder Frederick J. Maroth but was pursued, becoming a memorial, following his death in November 2013.

Alexander Schneider (1908-1993), described by Tully Potter, in his customarily excellent essay for the album booklet, as "one of the more remarkable musicians of the last century." was a violinist who expanded into something of a one-man music industry." He had spent a dozen years (1932-44) as second violinist of the Budapest Quartet, the third Russian to replace the old Hungarian players. (His older brother Mischa, a cellist, had preceded him by two years. A few years later, with the coming of violist Boris Kroyt, the Russianization of the Budapest would be complete.) Schneider eventually rejoined the Budapest, and even though the second violinist is normally thought to play the least defining role in a string quartet, to be the most interchangeable element, it's fascinating how much animated and musically probing the Budapest was with Schneider than without.

In the period between his Budapest stints, Schneider undertook also sorts of chamber music initiatives and became a mainstay, first of Pablos Casals' Prades Festivals and then of the Marlboro Festival (more and more often as a conductor), and devoted more and more of his energies to performances with young performers. Around 1950 his attention turned to the great body of Haydn's string quartets, and it became known that the newly formed Haydn Society, taking advantage of the dawn of the LP era, was planning to record all of the string quartets with a Haydn formed for the purpose by Schneider, which came to include violinist Isidore Cohen (later second violinist of the Juilliard Quartet and the violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio), violist Karen Tuttle, and cellist Madeline Foley, in time replaced by Herman Busch (whose brothers included the outstanding conductor Fritz Busch and violinist Adolf Busch, the father-in-law of pianist Rudolf Serkin).

The quartet did perform all the Haydn quartets in concert, but with funds critically short was unable to record the 24 quartets of Opp. 9, 54/55, 64, and 71/74, though it turns out that Op. 64 was actually begun; the first and last movements of Op. 64, No. 1 have their first commercial release, edited from unedited master tapes from a session in October 1954. The Schneider Quartet Haydn performances remain unmatched for their combination of structural integrity with personal relish and big and bold interpretive choices.

By way of illustration, I thought we would listen to a couple of movements we've already heard, the first movement of Op. 33, No. 2, and the famous theme and variations movement of Op. 76, No. 3, and then dip into the early quartets.

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (2) -- Haydn and Bruckner, part 2

The First Day

The Fourth Day

Orchestral depiction of the lighting of the firmament

URIEL: In full splendor rises now
the sun, streaming:
a wondrous bridegroom,
a giant, proud and happy
to run his path.

With gentle motion and soft shimmer
the moon steals through the silent night.

Waldemar Kmentt (t), Uriel; Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. Philips, recorded July 1966

by Ken

We began this tribute to that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) Friday night with samples of his Haydn and Bruckner. Now it wouldn't be that difficult to construct a polemical argument to show how much these composers have in common, but rather obviously they're worlds apart in temperament (Haydn's urbane classicism vs. Bruckner's cosmically and yet somehow chastely sprawling romanticism), scale, and outlook.

As I mentioned Friday night, most of the performances we're hearing in this week's and next's Jochum remembrance, during the Sunday Classics hiatus, come from the Sunday Classics archives, but both this week and next we're going to be hearing some that we haven't heard before. Today it's a recording that was included in the same large Berkshire Record Outlet order that yielded our earlier tribute to those three deeply musical conductorial "K"s, Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe: the CD edition of a performance I'd had on LP for ages, Jochum's Philips recording of Franz Joseph Haydn's great oratorio The Creation. The snippets we've heard above are tastes of the selections we're going to hear shortly from the First and Fourth Days of creation.


OUR MAN FOR KEEPING SLOW MOVEMENTS MOVING

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (1) -- Haydn and Bruckner, part 1

Eugen Jochum conducts his longtime orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, in the first part of the opening Allegro moderato of one of his signature pieces, the Bruckner Seventh Symphony. (The conclusion of the movement is posted below.)

by Ken

During Sunday Classics's hiatus, while I ponder its future and concentrate on importing more of the Sunday Classics "legacy" into the new stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken" blog (at sundayclassicswithken.blogspot.com -- hey, on the long march back to 2008 we've already gotten back as far as June 2012!), I've stumbled across issues arising from the stroll through those posts, as well as issues arising from records I've acquired, first from a massive Berkshire Record Outlet order and, more recently, from a visit to my friend Richard that included helping him cull duplicates from his collection.

The BRO order already yielded a December preview-and-post devoted to "Remembering Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe," three conductors who are dear to my heart for their uneccentric deep-rooted musicianship. As it happens there was another conductor who fits well in this group -- and missed it by a single letter, being a "J" rather than a "K" -- and happens to have been intriguingly represented in both those piles of acquisitions. Like our "K" men, Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) has been well represented here in Sunday Classics, and thereupon hangs what I'm projecting to a four-part series this week and next, including both symphonic and operatic representations. (We once heard Bruno Walter talking in a 1958 radio interview about the great differences between symphonic and operatic conducting, and it happens that all four of our J-K conductors, like Maestro Walter himself, happen to have done top-quality work in both fields.)

HERE'S A GORGEOUS PERFORMANCE OF MUSIC BY
A COMPOSER JOCHUM HAD A SPECIAL AFFINITY FOR

From the September 2010 post "Finally we hear the Haydn slow movement we've been gearing up for, from Symphony No. 88" we hear this breathtaking Largo built around a "hymn-like theme" whose phrases are capped by what I described as a "halo."

HAYDN: Symphony No. 88 in G:
ii. Largo

Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded October 1961

When Haydn met London (and vice versa), neither was ever the same again

HAYDN: The Creation, Part I:
Orchestral introduction, "The Representation of Chaos"

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, June 1986

by Ken

The symphony we're hearing this week, Franz Joseph Haydn's Drum Roll (No. 103), from which we heard the ingeniously alternating minor-and-major theme-and-variations movement in Friday night's preview, is from the second set of six symphonies the composer produced for his visits to London in 1791-92 and 1794-95. The 12 symphonies are known collectively as Haydn's "London" symphonies, or sometimes the "Salomon" symphonies, after the violinist-turned-impresario Johann Peter Salomon, who lured the 59-year-old composer to London in the first place, as the late conductor Georg Tintner (1917-1999) reminds us in this little commentary recorded in 1992.

Maestro Tintner recalls the circumstances
of Haydn's summons to London

I'm not sure it's possible to overstate the explosive effect Haydn and the London musical public had on each other. Despite the composer's near-sequestration for nearly 30 years in Austrian backwaters running the musical establishment of the princes Esterházy, he knew he occupied an elite position among the composers of his day. But he had never experienced the kind of contact with the general music public that he did when he arrived in London. He seems to have been both startled and humbled to discover just how famous he was and just how much his music was loved.

Characteristically, Haydn responded, not by basking in praise or resting on his laurels, but by pushing himself further. His place in musical history would have been secure if he had written nothing from 1791 on, but the creative outpouring that was yet to come is kind of mind-boggling. He had, for example, already composed 90-plus symphonies, including dozens of masterpieces, but the dozen "London" symphonies are something else again. And as Maestro Tintner points out, it was his contact with the English oratorio tradition that planted the seed for the two great oratorios yet to come, The Creation and The Seasons. It was in fact Salomon who suggested the Creation to him as possible oratorio subject matter.

What we heard up top is the orchestral introduction to The Creation, "The Representation of Chaos," one of the most extraordinary depictions in the musical literature. (When has chaos ever sounded this beguiling?)

AND IT SETS UP AN AMAZING MOMENT --

which we're going to hear by continuing just a few more minutes into the oratorio.

Preview: A "Drum Roll," please, as we prepare to ponder Haydn's amazing adventures in London

"The second movement is a set of variations, and the most original thing about it is that the theme of the variations is in the minor mode, but every second [section] is in the major mode. So the theme is minor, the first variation is major; the second variation is minor; and so on. I daresay that Gustav Mahler was particularly fond of this movement, because his own works show influences of that kind."

-- the late conductor Georg Tintner (1917-1999), from a spoken
introduction to Haydn's Symphony No. 103 (Drum Roll)

by Ken

It's an amazing story, Franz Joseph Haydn's two trips to London, in 1791-92 and 1794-95, one of the most amazing in the annals of artistic creation, and I want to talk a little about it on Sunday. Perhaps not surprisingly, it's the subject that Georg Tintner raised at the outset of the little talk devoted to Haydn's Symphony No. 103, known as the Drum Roll (for its opening drum roll -- d'oh!) from which I've quoted the couple of sentences above about the slow movement.

As a matter of fact, it's that little talk of Georg Tintner's that prompted me to choose the Drum Roll Symphony, from the second set of six symphonies (Nos. 99-104) that Haydn composed for London, as our "sampler" of his London experience. And I thought we could start by listening to this alternating minor-and-major theme-and-variations movement, one of Haydn's great slow movements (and never mind that it's expressly designed not to sound like a slow movement). Since the movement turns out to be a showcase for the orchestra, I can't imagine a better orchestra to play it for us than the Concertgebouw.


Concertgebouw Orchestra, Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded November 1976


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

As noted we'll be considering the phenomenon of Haydn's conquest of London, and we'll be hearing the whole of the Drum Roll Symphony.

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