Flying high with Haydn

Violinist Aisslinn Nosky.

First, the bad news.

Apparently the music of Franz Joseph Haydn is no longer enough of a draw to fill Symphony Hall; for last weekend's all-Haydn program from the Handel and Haydn Society played to only a two-thirds-full house. It seems Boston is only happy to listen to Haydn when he brings a friend along for the ride - like Mozart.  Or Beethoven.  Or even Handel!

And to be blunt - THAT'S SO WRONG.

Catch a grip, people. Haydn is awesome.  Totally awesome.

For proof you need look no further than this program itself, dubbed "Haydn in Paris" (even though most of the music was written in Austria). It opened with the early Symphony No. 6, known as "Le matin," a delightful evocation of a pastoral morning (and very probably an inspiration for somebody else's "Pastoral" Sixth Symphony).  

Next came the Violin Concerto in G major - a buoyant yet mature crowd-pleaser.  Then the overture to a lost opera, L'isola disabitata - with a storm scene like nobody else's.  Finally, Symphony No. 82 (yes, 82), "The Bear," which closes with a rousing Scottish dance that seems to transform the entire symphony into a hurdy-gurdy (orchestral onomatopoeia was a Haydn specialty, btw).

I know; four hits in a row - that was the good news.  The better news was that Handel and Haydn pulled all this off with vivid color, a crisp attention to detail, and a palpable joie de vivre - which is everything in Haydn, frankly, as he was as witty a composer as Mozart (perhaps even wittier).  Artistic director Harry Christophers has been working for some time on physically loosening up the H&H players, and you could hear (and see) the results of all that coaxing last weekend.  Most of the orchestra played standing up, and there was a graceful lilt swinging through their performance (particularly in "The Bear") that was clean yet thrillingly free.

The orchestra didn't just give it up for Christophers, though.  Concert mistress Aisslinn Nosky came center stage to lead the Violin Concerto in G Major, dressed in her best Sgt. Pepper duds (above left) - and with this musician at the helm (whose playing is as fiery as her hair) the performance proved a  lively wonder. What's more, Nosky seemed to have left behind the showy excesses of her turn in the spotlight last season; this time around, there was a depth and singing eloquence in evidence that beautifully matched the music, as well as her own passion for playing.

Meanwhile Christophers dazzled twice, in both "Le matin" and "The Bear," thus banishing all memory of the slightly uneven playing in his recent Purcell outing.  In "Le matin" the ensemble was deliciously fresh, and turned on a tonal dime from the sparkling opening movement (distinguished by Christopher Krueger's lark-like flute) to the very different demands of the far-more-sober Adagio (marked by what amounted to a delicately rising duet between Nosky and cellist Guy Fishman - Nosky again impressed in a subtle interpretation of the later violin solo).

"The Bear" is perhaps less complex in over-arching theme, but it's still a barn-burner (and I think the only piece in "Haydn in Paris" that was actually written in Paris - see comments).  The second movement revolves around a dazzling development through the classic conceit of theme-and-variation, but it's the finale that sends the audience home smiling.  It is also the source of the symphony's sobriquet - to early audiences, its rhythmic, bag-pipe-like drone recalled the music of the fair, and the dancing bear.  Well, at H&H "The Bear" certainly danced - it all but stomped, in fact, in a climax that went on and on, as Haydn indulged one of his favorite jokes: the symphony that won't quite end.  Not that anyone wanted it to!  Now if Christophers, Nosky and Co. can only convince Boston that Haydn is Da Man, and reason enough all by himself to make a trek to Symphony Hall . . .

Hails and farewells from the Emerson String Quartet

The Emerson String Quartet

Last Friday Celebrity Series welcomed the Emerson String Quartet (above) in what felt a bit like a farewell concert - although it was really only a farewell to cellist David Finckel, who will be leaving the ensemble next year (he will be replaced by Paul Watkins).  So it was no surprise the program brimmed with other farewells - it featured Haydn's farewell to the string quartet (Op. 77, No. 2), as well as what unexpectedly turned out to be Beethoven's farewell to everything, the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, No. 16.  The concert was balanced by one big "hello" - the rolling premiere of Thomas Adès' The Four Quarters, which was commissioned for the Emersons by the Carnegie Hall Corporation.

Needless to say, the performance gave poignant, persistent evidence of why people are already feeling nostalgic toward this quartet's current line-up (which has endured for more than three decades).  The maturity, the insight, the passionate detail, the confident, unspoken sense of ensemble - it was all there, again, just as it always is with the Emersons.  The opening Haydn was particularly delightful - it played as a rich, perhaps slightly rueful emotional statement with a buoyant chuckle rippling just beneath its surface.  Propelled by Eugene Drucker on first violin, the opening Allegro moderato was exquisitely Mozartean (scholars claim it quotes the "catalogue aria" from Don Giovanni), while the following Menuetto proved deliciously playful - and the indispensable Finckel's cello all but bounced through the final Vivace assai.  To be honest, I felt this was the quartet's finest playing of the night (but then this is one of my favorite quartets, too).

Next came the Adès, which perhaps inevitably sounded a bit thin when sandwiched between late Haydn and Beethoven.  I'm generally a big fan of this challenging composer, but I have to admit - I think this may be one of his minor works; it  comes with an overt metaphoric program, but not much of a developing intellectual one.  Still, time will tell, and the audience certainly seemed to warm up to it (but then it gets better as it goes along, too).

As usual for Adès, Four Quarters is built on extremes of tone and dynamic, and depends on a certain alienated formal precision.  It's also a clear meditation, like La Mer and other works, on specific times of day; the first movement, Nightfalls, sets strange booms of sound against a kind of low, dreaming bass; something (perhaps human consciousness) is collapsing here into a sleepy drone.  In contrast, the following Morning Dew (excerpt below) is a spiky wake-up call of pizzicato effects, with plucked strings conjuring dozens of droplets precipitating out of the atmosphere.  This isn't too far from Brian-Eno-level electronica, however, where the concept does most of the heavy lifting; and the churning Days likewise plays like a self-conscious, but rather obvious, chunk of pop.  Adès only really gets down to work in the finale, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, which both hints at some mystical limit beyond the scope of our daily lives, and actually gets somewhere musically, too, thanks to a gracefully building contrapuntal development.



After Adès it was on to Beethoven, and what the master didn't realize at the time would be his last completed piece, Op. 135, No. 16. The work is famous for the inscription on its final movement, “Muss es sein? Es muss sein” (“Must it be? It must be”), which is perhaps not so much a reflection of the great composer's awareness of his impending mortality (he had a number of projects cooking at the time of his death, including a 10th symphony) as some eerily prescient, half-comical accidental portent.  The Emersons seemed to take the piece as mostly another of the composer's meditations on the pleasures and limits of classicism; with Philip Setzer on lead violin,  the Allegretto and Vivace were elegant, but not deep - depth came later, in the third movement, which touched here and there on the spiritual transcendence that illuminates the other late quartets; but this was shaken off again in a vigorous final Allegro.

After tumultous applause, the Emersons returned for a single encore, the first movement of Ives' First Quartet, generally known as the "Salvation Army" quartet.  This proved everything it should be: affectionately parodic but eventually affirming, and tossed off with the Emersons' usual low-key mastery.  It was hard to bid them (and especially cellist Finckel) farewell after that, I admit - but perhaps we're only on the verge of an exciting "hello," and another dazzling career phase, for this stellar ensemble.

Boston Baroque moves heaven and earth

Boston Baroque, with soloists, in action.

I confess that "In the beginning," as the saying goes, I was nervous. As Boston Baroque essayed the famous opening bars of Haydn's The Creation (Die Schöpfung), which are meant to convey primordial chaos, things sounded, well . . . not exactly chaotic, but instead simply under-rehearsed. Entrances and exits felt perfunctory, and crucial crescendos and diminuendos just weren't there (particularly in a climbing scale from the clarinet, which should shoot off into the sonic nebulae like a sputtering comet).  My partner and I gave each other our patented "Uh-oh" look.  Were we in for a long night?

Thankfully, we quickly realized we weren't.  The orchestra righted itself with the C-major blast that accompanies "Let there be light," and never looked back.  And strangely enough, when the instrumentalists returned to the heavens for the moment in which God puts the sun and moon through their paces, they did their best playing of the night.  So go figure.  Other highlights - among many - included the lugubriously lilting entrance of the great whales, and the rise of dawn over Eden. The Creation is famously all about tone-painting, as Haydn musically catalogs everything mentioned in Genesis (and a whole lot more), and happily conductor Martin Pearlman and his orchestra brought the same even-handed detail to the Leviathan as they did to the lowly worm (which yes, gets its own brief motif).

The chorus was likewise in solid form - although they were singing in German, a language which is always hard for me to assess in performance (even when sung correctly, it rarely sounds pinpoint sharp).  At any rate, the choruses don't do all that much in The Creation but add an exclamation point of praise (perhaps a bit repetitively) to the arias of the soloists, which the chorale did with gusto.

And fortunately Boston Baroque had brought an A-team of soloists to this particular game - soprano Amanda Forsythe shared the stage with tenor Keith Jameson and bass-baritone Kevin Deas.  Ms. Forsythe looked radiant, and undaunted by the fact that she's once more expecting - perhaps any minute,  to be honest, from the look of things.  (Someone should really write this intrepid lady an oratorio called The Procreation!)  Forsythe sang the role of Gabriel with her usual exquisitely lyrical purity, perhaps reaching a new height in the song to the lark and the nightingale (which as yet sings no mournful note of sorrow) accompanied by evocative trills from flutists Sandra Miller, Wendy Rolfe, and Andrea LeBlanc.  Later,  as Eve, Forsythe smiled patiently through Haydn's silly emphasis on her obedience to Adam (but perhaps we should forgive the aging composer's sexist daydream, as it's known his own wife, to whom he was always faithful, was famously difficult, and even professed to dislike his music!).

Forsythe was perhaps the first among equals in this talented trio, but both Deas and Jameson had brilliant moments.  Deas's voice wasn't showcased at its strongest in his opening arias, which are placed a bit high in his range; his instrument is at its richest lower down - luckily for us, he also essayed both the whales and the lowly worm (with a closing note that seemed to drop at least an octave below the stage floor).  Deas also made a warm and unassuming Adam - and Jameson had his best moments in Eden, too, singing of the creation of the First Couple with a ravishingly sophisticated radiance.  The evening ended just as it should - on a note of poignant, innocent sweetness (Eve and Adam are just about to be tempted by that notorious apple).  One of the things that is special about Haydn is his expression of a truly thankful faith via an exquisitely inventive musical voice.  In Boston Baroque's performance you could hear both sides of that deeply moving combination.

Last weekend brought the season opener for the Handel and Haydn Society, and the return to our fair city of artistic director Harry Christophers. By now the success that I predicted for Christophers upon his appointment has become a foregone conclusion - ticket sales are at their highest level in a decade, new recordings have been met with lavish praise, and Christophers' contract has been extended through 2016 (meaning he will guide the Society through the entirety of its bicentennial celebration).

At the center of this story have been the spectacular results Christophers quickly achieved with the H&H chorus; but that success has been shadowed by a slower, more complicated process with the orchestra - particularly the string section.  Much-loved (and well-connected) musicians have been asked to step aside, and local favorites have been passed over in promotions; I myself wondered at some (but hardly all) of these decisions.  At any rate, by now the re-alignment is complete: Canadian Aisslinn Nosky (at left) now leads a re-ordered violin section, while Guy Fishman has assumed the role of principal cellist.

And while I think Christophers has clearly had to pay a political price for these decisions, artistically I have to admit they're already paying off. Nosky's playing is as striking as her hair, and at last Friday's concert, the H&H strings sang with a clean, vibrant fluency they've never quite had before.

But then I sometimes got the sneaky feeling that Christophers had selected his program with the express purpose of showing off his new toy (as it were).  The centerpiece was Mozart's Symphony No. 40, which of course depends utterly upon the strings - and even the fortepiano concerti the conductor had chosen for the first half (Haydn's F-Major Concertino, and Mozart's Concerto No. 22, both essayed by the brilliant Kristian Bezuidenhout) aren't merely showcases for the piano but also extended conversations between keyboard and orchestra.

And then there were the two overtures (to "Autumn," and "Winter") from Haydn's The Seasons, both of which spotlight the strings.  "Autumn" is sweet, but brief as Indian summer - "Winter," however, is a starkly dramatic tour de force, and the orchestra simply played the hell out of it.  The always-welcome Bezuidenhout, meanwhile, was far more sparkling and spontaneous here than when I saw him last spring.  When this pianist is at his best (and he mostly was in this program) everything feels as if it's being improvised by a genius on the fly; Bezuidenhout sounds almost intoxicated by his own talent, and yet always keeps his touch under exquisite control - it's like listening to a kind of pure, baroque jazz, as a friend of mine once put it.  But then perhaps Bezuidenhout was as drunk on his instrument as he was on his music; he had chosen (with a lot of defensive excuse-making), a fortepiano built by Rod Regier after Viennese originals from almost fifty years after Mozart's heyday.   I suppose an early-music specialist would quibble at that, but the moment I heard this instrument's tone I confess I didn't give a damn about its provenance!

Then, after a solid turn through another worthy, if slightly obscure, overture (from Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf's oratorio Esther) came Mozart's familiar 40th, which was more richly rendered here than I think H&H might ever have managed before.  I wouldn't argue that Christophers charted an emotional arc through the whole symphony - which extends from a hauntingly anxious opening to a passionate resolution in which nothing feels at all resolved. Here the separate movements felt like fully-rounded, slightly-disconnected classical entities (which is where attention to detail can sometimes lead).  But minute to minute, the performance was nonetheless ravishing.  The strings sounded sublime, vibrant and evocative yet with a precise sense of balance, and the winds and horns responded with superb grace.  Clearly Mr. Christophers has successfully completed the next step in his artistic mission at Handel and Haydn.  We can't wait for the rest of the journey.