Tag Archives: Franz Joseph Haydn

Online Concert: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet plays Haydn @ Wigmore Hall

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Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano)

Haydn
Piano Sonata in D major Hob.XVI:24 (c1773)
Piano Sonata in A flat major Hob.XVI:46 (c1767-8)
Piano Sonata in E flat major Hob.XVI:49 (1789-90)

Wigmore Hall, Monday 20 February 1pm

by Ben Hogwood

Haydn’s piano sonatas remain an underappreciated corner of his output as a composer. This is understandable on one hand, given the sheer volume and consistency of his output in other forms. The symphonies, string quartets and piano trios all enjoy higher billing, but gradually the sonatas are coming up on the rails.

This is in part due to recent recordings from pianists such as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Marc-André Hamelin and Peter Donohoe. Bavouzet, however, has gone further, completing a cycle of the sonatas in eleven instalments for Chandos. If they are all as stylishly played as this BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert, then many treats await.

First of three works in this recital was a D major sonata full of vim and vigour. Bavouzet enjoyed its brightly voiced start, securing a lovely articulation to the right hand while bringing the historical connections through. The energy of Domenico Scarlatti was in evidence, while in the aria-like slow movement there was an operatic air. With an expressive right hand and softly alternating left, Bavouzet found Haydn’s soft centre, before enjoying the florid right hand and the playful nature of in the finale.

In the second work we enjoyed classic, ‘exploratory’ Haydn, the composer experimenting with different forms and far flung keys – such as the D flat major chosen for the slow movement. Here the influence is more C.P.E. Bach, heard in a captivating Allegro, adorned with ornaments in the right hand. Bavouzet once again showed off a bright, clear sound and lightness of touch, with sleights of humour visible at every turn. The slow movement did indeed travel further afield, creating an air of mystery, with exceptional playing in the upper reaches of the right hand. The finale was crisp and clear.

Proof that Haydn sonatas are starting to make themselves better known came with the third work. This was not the E flat sonata placed 52 in Haydn’s output – often chosen as an example sonata in a concert programme. Instead we had a winsome and deeply personal work, written for the composer’s personal friend and confidant, Maria Anna von Genzinger at the turn of 1789 and 1790. As the musicologist Daniel Heartz notes, we know more about the composition of this piece than any other in Haydn’s output, due to the correspondence between the pair, where the composer gives uncharacteristic outpourings of feeling and loneliness.

Bavouzet’s performance immediately took on a conversational air, wit and underlying tenderness lying just beneath the relatively grand gesture of the opening. The intimate, thoroughly enjoyable dialogue between the hands spoke of two people enjoying a one-on-one rapport, before the first movement ended with a flourish and an exclamation mark. The second movement had a lovely disposition to its main theme but then a darker tint to the central section, moving to such ‘un-classical’ keys as B flat minor. The finale also stressed the importance of the silences between the notes, Bavouzet observing these just as closely in the overall phrasing.

This was a wonderful recital, a reminder that Haydn’s importance and influence within the piano sonata medium should not be overlooked. The music had an endearing freshness throughout, communicated with persuasion by a pianist on top of his game.

As an encore, Bavouzet switched styles to Massenet, dedicating his performance of the French composer’s whirlwind Toccata to his dear friend Paul Westcott, a much-missed presence with whom he worked in the beginnings of his career with Chandos, and through to the Haydn itself. Paul would have loved the pizzazz of this version, and Bavouzet’s virtuosity and brilliance would have been appreciated from afar – of that there is no doubt!.

For more livestreamed concerts from the Wigmore Hall, click here. Meanwhile the Spotify playlist below contains recordings made by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet of all the repertoire in this concert:

Online Concert: Doric String Quartet & Brett Dean @ Wigmore Hall – Haydn & Beethoven

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Doric String Quartet [Alex Redington, Ying Xue (violins), Hélène Clément (viola), John Myerscough (cello)], Brett Dean (viola)

Haydn String Quartet in F major Op.50/5 ‘The Dream’ (1787)
Beethoven String Quintet in C major Op.29 (1801)

Wigmore Hall, Monday 23 January 1pm

by Ben Hogwood

Is there a better musical tonic on a grey Monday in January than a Haydn string quartet? Not in this case, as the Doric String Quartet built on the solid foundations of their recent recordings of the composer’s music for Chandos with a well-crafted and nicely weighted account of one of the composer’s middle-period works.

Haydn wrote so many symphonies, string quartets and piano trios – to name just three disciplines in which he was prolific – that nicknames are helpful in identifying the works. Some of them can be quite spurious, but in the case of The Dream the label describes the serene slow movement of the quartet, and its carefree violin fantasies. The work is placed fifth work in a set of six quartets written for King Frederick William II of Prussia, and finds Haydn making further strides in the development of this new form.

The Doric captured that sense of discovery, although they took just a little while to settle, with a couple of relatively coarse moments at the start. This was however a beautifully played account, with an enjoyable lightness of touch in the outer movements and an airy account of the ‘dream’ movement itself. The players were clearly sticking to the first principles of chamber music, enjoying the conversational exchanges between the instruments but bringing the audience in on their enjoyment too. This was most evident in a lively third movement Menuetto and Vivace finale.

Brett Dean is one of the most-performed living composers, but he also has a formidable CV as a viola player, playing in the Berlin Philharmoniker for 14 years. While composing is his primary discipline these days he remains active as an instrumentalist. The Doric Quartet’s current tour includes his String Quartet Hidden Agendas, while welcoming Dean as a notable addition to the ensemble for Beethoven’s String Quintet.

The five have an easy musical chemistry, Dean effortlessly slotting in to play a work that is beginning to get the recognition it deserves, both within Beethoven’s output and in context as a fine continuation of Mozart’s innovations in the form. This performance got to the heart of Beethoven’s energetic writing in a flowing first movement, enjoying the melodic exchanges, while the second movement explored the richer mid-range colours available in music of elegiac quality, as well as enjoying the composer’s excursions to further flung keys.

In the third movement Scherzo there was a notable raising of the stakes, and an upsurge in kinetic energy. The demands were comfortably matched by the five players here, who built on this with a finale of high drama and stormy countenance.

For more livestreamed concerts from the Wigmore Hall, click here

In concert – April Fredrick, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods – The Journey Home: Haydn, David Matthews, Barber & Mozart

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Haydn Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor, Hob.I:45 ‘Farewell’ (1772)
David Matthews Le Lac Op.146 (2018)
Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915 Op.24 (1947)
Mozart Symphony no.36 in C major K425 ‘Linz’

April Fredrick (soprano), English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Great Malvern Priory, Malvern
Wednesday 23 November 2022

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The English Symphony Orchestra’s season really hit its stride this evening with a programme featuring two major vocal works of the 20th and 21st centuries, heard alongside two notable while very different symphonies from near the start and towards the end of the Classical era.

As Kenneth Woods indicated, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony would have been determinedly avant-garde to early listeners, and much of that innovative quality came over here. Not least in the initial Allegro, its jagged course and disjunctive tonal shifts only nominally countered by the Adagio’s increasingly fraught introspection. With its stark alternations in motion and phrasing, the Menuetto proved a telling foil to a finale where a turbulent Presto precedes an Adagio whose eloquence was sustained as the music subsides and musicians vacate the stage.

Whether or not this symphony would have been better placed at the end of this concert, it set up productive contrast with David Matthews’s Le Lac. Remembered more as statesman than poet, Alphonse de Lamartine was a crucial figure in French literature of the early Romantic period – his lengthy 1820 poem a remembrance of lost love comparable to verse by Shelley and Heine, and one whose slowly intensifying rapture is to the fore in this evocative scena. Two orchestral interludes aside, its formal and emotional progress is essentially determined by the vocal line; with which April Fredrick was at one in conveying the wistfulness but also anguish inherent of this music. The fastidious textures were no less finely delineated by the ESO, Woods sustaining a cohesive overall trajectory from earlier promise to ultimate loss.

Evidently it was Fredrick who had suggested juxtaposing this piece with Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which pairing succeeded admirably in terms of underlining conceptual and expressive links between them. Its sense of loss may be psychological rather than personal, but an emotional force comes over tangibly for all this music’s overt restraint: James Agee’s poetic reportage summoning a response the more affecting for its restraint and in whose vocal part Fredrick was never less than attuned. Woods brought no mean sensitivity or character to orchestral writing such as eschews the rhetoric found in many of Barber’s earlier scores and so foreshadows the subtlety of those two decades hence. This is a work with few significant precursors or successors, and the present reading made the most of its singular atmosphere.

The evening concluded with the relative extroversion of Mozart’s ‘Linz’ Symphony – a piece whose having been written in four days doubtless occasioned its technical brilliance, yet also a formulaic quality to its actual substance. Not, however, in an Andante whose gentle pathos was to the fore, or a Menuetto whose brevity belies its resourceful use of woodwind. Woods found a winning effervescence in the initial Allegro, and if the second-half repeat in the final Presto may be one such too far, this music’s Haydnesque wit was never less than appealing.

It set the seal on a well-conceived and finely executed concert that, in pivoting between the established and unfamiliar (not only between but also within works) typifies thr resourceful approach to programming with which Woods and the ESO have now become synonymous.

For more information on the artists in this concert, click on the links to read about April Fredrick, Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra. For more on composer David Matthews, click here

In Concert – Pavel Haas Quartet @ Wigmore Hall: Haydn, Prokofiev & Haas

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Pavel Haas Quartet [Veronika Jarůšková, Marek Zwiebel (violins), Karel Untermüller (viola), Peter Jarůšek (cello)

Haydn String Quartet in G major Op.76/1 (1979)
Prokofiev String Quartet no.2 in F major Op.92 (1941)
Haas String Quartet no.2 Op.7 ‘From The Monkey Mountains’ (1925)

Wigmore Hall, London
Thursday 24 November 2022

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

The Pavel Haas Quartet often cause a stir on their visits to the Wigmore Hall, and this concert was no exception for the Czech ensemble.

Many of Haydn’s mature string quartets begin with a trio of chords effectively designed to hush the audience and guide their ears towards the performance getting underway. The first in his crowning set of six quartets published as Op.76 is no exception, though in this red blooded account the Pavel Haas Quartet pinned the audience back in their seats, such was the vigour with which this performance began.

There were some ragged edges to their interpretation, and less evidence of the genial Haydn that makes himself known with the conversational melody of the first movement. We did however get more exposure to his experimental side, through an interpretation pointing the music forward towards middle period Beethoven. The quickstep third movement, very much a scherzo rather than a minuet, pointed up Haydn’s daring harmonic excursions and dalliances, as did the finale, based mostly in the minor key and featuring a number of brisk about-turns. Stemming the tide was the second movement Adagio, a reverent account with a solemn air to its central section in particular.

There followed a superbly played account of Prokofiev’s String Quartet no.2. This attractive work is not often heard in concert, which is a shame for it has a good deal of spice and charm through its investment in folk tunes from the Northern Caucausian region, where the composer was evacuated in 1941. Encouraged by his new neighbours, Prokofiev achieved a very satisfying blend of the original tunes with spiky good humour and scrunched up harmonic dissonances, always in thrall to the highly melodic content.

The first movement revelled in the abundance of good tunes, bringing the Pavel Haas Quartet’s Slavonic instincts into play. The mood softened for a heartfelt cello solo from Peter Jarůšek, setting a thoughtful and delicately nostalgic tone for the Adagio. Here more time was taken for reflection, with a noticeable chill running through Prokofiev’s writing.

Within the folk references it is possible to discern the worrisome mood of the time, with World War Two underway. The third movement however felt like a show of resolution in the face of this threat, laced with humour that in this performance could have been exploited to greater effect. It was however a fine performance, with terrific ensemble playing.

The main event of the concert was undoubtedly a performance of music from the quartet’s namesake. Pavel Haas, born in Moravia, studied with Janáček between 1920 and 1922, completing his String Quartet no.2 three years later. Tragically in 1941 he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and died in Auschwitz three years later. Much of his work lay in neglect but has in the last thirty years enjoyed an extremely welcome renaissance, led by a number of enterprising recordings made in the 1990s, not least that of this work for Decca’s Entartete Musik imprint in the 1990s by the Hawthorne String Quartet. Since then the second quartet has gone on to gain a welcome foothold in the concert hall.

It would be difficult to contemplate a better performance than this one from the Pavel Haas Quartet. Led assertively by Veronika Jarůšková, they showed what an assured and imaginative piece it is, a travelogue giving the listener a tour of the sights and sounds of the famous Monkey Mountain range in Moravia.

The musical language is a curious but highly engaging hybrid of influences, drawing on the music of Dvořák and Smetana but in compressed melodic pockets of heightened intensity. Janáček, too, is an influential voice, but Haas’s unusual phrasing and distinctive rhythms make for a unique and enjoyable style.

The Pavel Haas Quartet enjoyed it greatly, the first two movements (Landscape and Coach, Coachman and Horse) enjoying the rarefied outdoor air and some crisply secured dance rhythms. The third movement, subtitled The Moon and I, was much colder to the touch, the muted strings taking time for introspection and creating some striking colours along the way. Their beautifully poised playing set up a riotous Wild Night finale where they were joined by percussionist Owen Gunnell (above), whose battery of instruments were expertly marshalled to bring the sounds of 1920s jazz into the fray.

The riotous closing pages brought the swaying Moravian dances and jazz rhythms to the foundations of the Wigmore Hall, brilliantly played and ideally balanced. So good was this section that the five performers gave us a quick reprisal as an encore, reminding us in the process of the fiercely original writing from a composer whose resurgence is to be greatly welcomed.  

In concert – Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Marie-Christine Zupancic, CBSO / Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla: Vaughan Williams, Haydn, Elgar, Weinberg & Britten

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Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910)
Haydn Cello Concerto no.1 in C major Hob.VIIb/1 (c1761)
Elgar Sospiri Op.70 (1914)
Weinberg Flute Concerto no.1 Op.75 (1961)
Britten The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Op.34 (1945)

Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Marie-Christine Zupancic (flute), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 6 October 2022

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Shortly to embark on its first tour of the United States in almost a quarter-century, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra tonight played some of the pieces to be included there – a diverse selection that amounted to a cohesive and well-balanced programme on its own terms.

Opening the concert was one of those pieces heard on the CBSO’s album The British Project, and while this orchestra has performed Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis often, Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla relatively swift traversal compelled attention. The opening stages felt a little detached – the offstage ‘orchestra’, placed offstage-left, more a background presence than active participant – but the string quartet contribution was eloquently rendered while the approach to the main climax was as unerringly judged as that resonant final chord.

Sheku Kanneh-Mason has been playing Haydn’s cello concertos extensively, so there was no doubting the control and insight brought to the C major work – earliest of the pair and poised between the Baroque and Classical eras in its combining formal lucidity with melodic poise. Kanneh-Mason was mindful of the opening movement’s Moderato indication, maintaining a steady and never headlong tempo that allowed his tonal finesse and elegance of phrasing full rein. The Adagio could have had greater inward intensity, but not that stealthy transition into the return of the main theme, and the final Allegro had wit and incisiveness aplenty. A much-reduced CBSO was responsive in support – Kanneh-Mason offering an unlikely yet appealing pizzicato take on Bacharach’s I Say a Little Prayer (found on his new album Song) as encore.

There cannot have been many times when Elgar’s Sospiri began the second half, but it did so this evening to enticing effect. MG-T drew out its pathos without no trace of affectation, and if the organ part was missing, the strings’ burnished eloquence was more than compensation.

After last week’s public premiere of his Jewish Rhapsody, MG-T turned to (relatively) more familiar Weinberg with his First Flute Concerto. It also proved an ideal showcase for Marie-Christine Zupancic, longstanding section-leader of the CBSO, to demonstrate her prowess as soloist – whether in the energetic interplay of the initial Allegro, deftly understated threnody of the Adagio, or whimsical humour of an Allegro that anticipates Weinberg finales to come. The strings responded with alacrity to a piece now taking its place in a still-limited repertoire.

Britten‘s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra has not been out of the repertoire in 77 years and it remains not just the finest educational work of its kind but an impressive showpiece in its own right. With the CBSO heard at full strength for the only time tonight, MG-T directed a performance which only fell short in the rather stolid rendering of the theme at the start. The traversal through the four orchestral sections threw up various distinctive cameos, while the closing fugue duly put the orchestra back together for what was an exhilarating apotheosis.

This was not quite the end, MG-T introducing the encore to feature on tour – Thomas Adès’s O Albion (from his quartet Arcadiana), here suitably evocative even if the irony of playing so -named a piece to a Birmingham audience can hardly have been lost on most of those present.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. For more information on the artists, click on the names of Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Marie-Christine Zupancic for more information, and head to the website of Mieczyslaw Weinberg for more information on the composer.