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Franz Josef HAYDN (1732-1809)
Complete Haydn Edition Vol.1
Concertos for Piano and Orchestra
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Gerrit Zitterbart piano
Schlierbacher Kammerorchester
directed by Thomas Fey
on modern instruments with period brass & timpani
HÄNSSLER Classic CD98.354
[55:34] full-price
by Benjamin Chee
The Long Intro
Perhaps so, but it's is worth recalling here that Haydn was the
musical celebrity of his day, wooed by fans and public institutions
alike, from as far afield as the University of Oxford to the King of
Naples. No less an aristocrat than the Empress of the Holy Roman
Empire herself (mother of Marie-Antoinette of France), with the
not-insubstantial forces of the Viennese Imperial Opera on hand,
declared that she went to Esterháza when she wanted to hear a
good opera. Haydn's blue-blooded employers would not have never
expected that posterity now remembers them only in connection with
their "worthy Haydn".
This intellectual element was, of course, the inception of the genre
of the keyboard concerto. This can be traced to Bach; in particular,
his Fifth Brandenburg Concerto contained an extensive keyboard
part, including unaccompanied solo portions, which was written
specifically to show off the virtuosity of the performer. We should
also note that while Bach and his peers did write keyboard concertos,
these were often rearrangements of concertos for other string or wind
instruments and not, concerto qua concerto, written to showcase
the keyboard.
The other invention was that of the pianoforte. Bach's son,
Carl Philipp Emmanuel, recognized the potential and technical
superiority of the piano over the harpsichord very early on and
singlehandedly wrote over sixty keyboard concertos with this new
instrument in mind. The piano was more responsive in dynamics and
could sustain notes for as long as the keys were depressed, over the
harpsichord which had little sustaining power and a limited range of
volume. (To increase volume, for example, harpsichordists had to play
notes doubled in octaves.)
The chronology of Haydn's keyboard concertos therefore runs parallel
with the inception of the keyboard as a concerto instrument as well as
the advent of the piano over harpsichord. It is not inconceivable that
performers and composers viewed both instruments as interchangeable -
indeed, Haydn's D major concerto was published as a Concerto per il
clavicembalo ó forte piano. The early Mozart piano concertos
also contain similar bipartite writing; only much later when the piano
was consolidated in ubiquity that composers started to write
pianistic effects unplayable on the all-but-extinct harpsichord.
One striking quality of the Haydn piano concertos - now that the
context of calling them as such has been established - is that the
soloist's line is often sparse in texture, sounding almost like
something which a very good player could perform one-handed.
Conversely, it is then also up to the performer's innate sense of
musical judgement to add his or her own artistic ornaments where the
music needs such embellishment, and to apply dynamics to bring out the
contrasts and contours of the music.
Thomas Fey and the Schlierbacher Kammerorchestra, as accompanists,
respond very intuitively to Zitterbart. The slow movement is taken
with a great deal of empathy and contemplation, almost like something
out of Chopin but without the rubato, which works surprisingly well.
He shifts back up two gears for the presto of the final
movement, charging right off the starting blocks at breakneck speed.
Indeed, the aggressive acceleration of pace between movements is
eye-raisingly erumpent, coming just after the gentle second movement;
a little less extrovertion, I think, would have served the music better.
Zitterbart also claims the second work, the G major Concerto, with a
similar manner as the first: a hybrid sculpture of the Classical and
romantic schools with a dash of Baroque. There's lots of rubato and
deft touches of technical virtuosity in the first movement, but I'm
left wondering if some other insight into this music has been lost in
exchange for this rugged, sinewy interpretation. The aria-like
Adagio sounds more Romantic, I'm sure, than Haydn would have
thought possible. The finale is another rocket-assisted take-off, with
Zitterbart and Fey burning liquid panache for fuel.
The risk in playing through difficult parts as if they were nothing
is, of course, you sometimes end up with nothing. This is,
fortunately, not the case here - not the entire case, anyway. The
muscular reading is palpable and, if such an adjective is applicable
to the periwigged music of "Papa Haydn", full-blooded. But the
musicians could have taken their feet off the acceleration pedal, in
order to spend more time to look around and explore this scenic
musical territory.
We're back on more familiar ground with the last Concerto in D major,
the best-known of Haydn's keyboard concertos. It's not hard to see why
its popularity is so well-deserved: the first movement begins with a
lyrical little melody that is quintessential Haydn. Zitterbart, with
Fey and his Schierlierbach accomplices, is most persuasive, with
finely-etched playing that makes the music sparkle. The Hungarian
rondo of the last movement is equally felicitious - just listen to
those natural horns in bar 13 - albeit closer to presto than
the Allegro assai that Haydn indicated in his tempo marking. In
between, the central movement is played with some warmth and empathy,
and with much less "Romanticism" as the other two.
The Orchestra
Indeed, this is not necessarily a bad thing, this continual
progression and reinvention of playing styles. One could even say that
this is essential, if rigor mortis is not to set in in this
field of "music of dead people from three hundred years ago", in an
age where everything moves at the speed of an electron.
Sound and Conclusion
All three works come in together at less than an hour; at full-price,
not overly generous, perhaps. (Either that, I suppose, or we have been
spoilt rotten by 70-minute super-budget discs.) There are
alternatives in the market with ampler couplings in this repertoire,
and this reason alone would already rule this disc out for those
solely out to build a collection.
On the other hand, it is fair to say that this disc was not issued
simply for the sake of flooding the market with repertoire. Far from
it. Despite their provincial-sounding names, Zitterbart, Fey and the
Schlierbacher Kammerorchester have an accomplished sense of style and
elegance that bestrides the best of the Baroque, Classical and
Romantic schools, and they are in their natural habitat with this
repertoire.
Haydn has for a long time suffered an unfavourable reputation as
"ear-candy" composer, or so I was told once by a musician in a
symphony orchestra. His music, he complained, lacked a certain
compositional sophistication, which made him "bland", "conventional"
and "uninteresting to perform". This artistic je ne sais quoi
was not helped, my friend concluded, by the fact that Haydn lived and
worked in the volatile evolutionary period that fell between the
proto-formalization of the Baroque and the stylistic consolidation of
the Classical schools.
Haydn and the Keyboard Concerto
Given Haydn's prolificity and achievement in bridging classical music
between the old and the new, it is therefore curious that his work in
the field of the keyboard concerto - the term we shall use for now -
has suffered from such neglect. Ironically, two critical inventions
occured in this interim phase which enabled the keyboard to shed its
role as an obbligato continuo instrument, as was the Baroque
practice, and take its place - indeed, even surpass them - as the full
equal of the other concertante instruments; one was technical and the
other was, shall we say, "intellectual".
The Recording
Gerrit Zitterbart (left) serves notice of such intentions from the opening of
the first work, the Concerto in F major. Sounding very much like what
you'd expect from classical-school Haydn, yet with a hint of
baroquerie, Zitterbart plays the music with élan, aided by
meticulous dynamics which imparts a sense of drama. The quick tempo in
the first movement makes the playing sound engagingly crisp, but this
also makes the keyboard roulades sound rushed - not that, to be fair,
Zitterbart gives any hint of this being a difficulty.
The Schlierbacher Kammerorchester, the liner notes inform us, was
drilled in historical performance styles by Nicholas Harnoncourt,
although they do not perform with period instruments (save the horns).
They are, perhaps, at the forefront of the current vogue among
conductors with modern orchestras to interpret their music from a
historical perspective - Zinman on
the Beethoven Nine, for example - which makes their style more
than readily identifiable. It makes me feel as if I could come back to
this music in a couple of years and pick them out in a blindfold test,
and that's saying something.
Soundwise, the soloist-orchestra balance is well-poised and the
quality generally of Hänssler's high standards. The acoustics of
the Festeburgkirche Frankfurt-am-Main lend a warm atmosphere to this
music. The recording was made in two sittings in March and June 1999.
As a curious teenager, Benjamin Chee, unlike the Empress of the Holy Roman
Empire, has nowhere to go if he wants to listen to a good opera.
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672: 15.2.2000 ©Benjamin Chee
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