Haydn Treasures in Advance of the Mozart Bicentennial

Next year Mozart will be everybody’s favorite composer, or so those in line to profit from the upcoming bicentennial--of Mozart’s death , keep in mind--are likely to claim.

Would anything like the bicentennial hoopla, already strongly in evidence, eventuate if it were instead a Haydn year?

Not that he has one coming: Papa won’t have been dead for 200 years until 2009, with these hucksters unlikely to be in attendance. There isn’t even a likely place for the selling of Haydn: no alluring, mountain-girt Salzburg, only humble Eisenstadt with its somewhat down-at-the-heels Esterhazy Palace, in the marshlands of flat, far-eastern Austria.

But then they are very different composers, which may be why they admired each other so much. Haydn is less tender, inclined to show his learning via musical jokes whose humor appeals mostly to other musicians, playing his emotions close to the vest. His music, compared to Mozart’s, is tightly wound, less expansive.

Then too Haydn is lacking in extra-musical mystique: Unlike Mozart, he had no child-prodigy upbringing, no nasty archbishops beating up on him, no sickly wife and children over whom to fret, no dire financial or emotional straits, no sweating it out as a free-lancer when other composers thrived on noble patronage. And no premature death, with burial in an unmarked grave.

In short, nothing to leave to sensation-seeking posterity. His only legacy is some of the most influential music ever written--music fit to be spoken of, and listened to, in the same breath as Mozart’s--to muddle the metaphor. The most widely accepted works of Haydn are his symphonies, although only a handful could be considered popular favorites. Among the hundred-plus extant symphonies are six commissioned by a Parisian concert organization in the mid-1780s.

These so-called “Paris” Symphonies--Nos. 82-87--are marvels of energetic, incisive wit pierced by shafts of darkness, but without the softening wistfulness characteristic of Mozart.

The spirit of these very grand works, three of which carry nicknames more imaginative than descriptive, is captured in shapely, dashing performances on the Virgin Classics label by London’s period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under conductor Sigiswald Kuijken: Nos. 82 (“The Bear”), 83 (“The Hen”) and 84 on one disc (90793); Nos. 85 (“The Queen of France”), 86 and 87 on the other (90844).

Kuijken has modified the severely clipped style that marked his conducting in the past while allowing his string players a measure of vibrato previously denied them. Agility and wit, with the addition of expansive phrasing that does not diminish the works’ rhythmic pulse, make these readings among the best of an attractive crop of recent Haydn releases.

Trevor Pinnock, leading his English Concert ensemble, tends to present Haydn a bit more broadly than Kuijken and some others among his scholarly colleagues, but the results remain far removed from the Romantic style.

Pinnock and company offer lucid, vital readings of seven of the so-called “Sturm und Drang” symphonies: hugely dramatic, economically constructed works of the 1760s and early ‘70s in which the composer gave genteel music conventions a battering from which they would never recover.

On a pair of Deutsche Grammophon Archiv CDs, Pinnock leads Nos. 35, 38, 39 and 59 (“Fire”) (427 661) and Nos. 26 (“Lamentation”), 49 (“The Passion”) and 58 (427 662).

A Haydn treasure that may be overlooked by the casual record shopper can be found on the tiny French Astree label, distributed by Harmonia Mundi U.S.A. The performers are the Quatuor Mosaiques--Mosaics Quartet, a name unlikely to have universal appeal--about whose identity, beyond the names of the individual players, the annotations offer not a clue.

They deserve better for their handsome interpretations of three of the 40-year-old Haydn’s wonderfully deep and expressive Opus 20 quartets, three of which (there are six in all) are presented here: Nos. 2, 3, 4 (Astree 8786).

With Opus 20, the string quartet medium attained equality (at least) with the symphony--at this historical point synonymous with the Haydn symphony--in its potential for depth of expression.

The Mosaic foursome plays them with admirable spirit and precision, producing a lovely, steady sound on their superbly matched period instruments--nothing at all like the droopy, whining tones too often tolerated from similar ensembles.

The young Soviet virtuoso Mikhail Pletniev makes a splendid showing in a program of three of Haydn’s most imposing, still vastly undervalued piano sonatas, Nos. 20, 50 and 52 (Virgin Classics 8786) in the usual numbering. The bonus is the moody, almost Chopinesque Variations in F minor.

Playing a modern concert grand, Pletniev, who will make his West Coast debut at Ambassador Auditorium in February, articulates Haydn’s lean, driving phrases with terrific verve while shaping the slow movements with a clarity that does not preclude sentiment.