How many compositions
can you name by major classical composers for instruments
which soon afterwards became obsolete? Haydn has his fair
share with these concertos for two lire organizzate and his
baryton trios, then there are Bach’s music for the pedal-harpsichord,
Vivaldi’s concertos for the tromba marina, Mozart’s music
for the glass harmonica and the basset clarinet, music by
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven for the mechanical clock, Schubert’s
Arpeggione Sonata ... Enough, then, to maintain a cottage
industry producing modern copies, which has already happened
in the case of the basset clarinet, avoiding the necessity,
where it is employed, of transposing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. I
seem to remember, too, a 1960s DGG recording of Mozart’s
music for glass harmonica played on a replica. Perhaps,
also, someone could license the master tapes of the 1960s
Oryx recordings of Bach on the pedal-harpsichord.
Modern copies of the baryton
do exist – there’s even a
clip on
Youtube demonstrating it – and recordings of the baryton
trios appear, for example, in the recent Brilliant Classics
Haydn box set, but the lira or lyra organizzata, a kind of
one-man-band, a hurdy-gurdy attached to a small chamber organ,
has been less fortunate, though working reproductions do
exist, in the V&A Museum, for example, and it’s even
possible to hear some
short extracts of Haydn’s
music played on such instruments. Usually the music is played
nowadays, if at all – I believe that this is the only current
recording – using pairs of wind instruments.
Like the baryton works,
written for his Esterházy patron, the concertos for lire
organizzate were commissioned, in this case by King Ferdinand
IV of Naples, an aficionado of the instrument. It has to
be admitted that the music is pleasant enough, but rather
small beer, apart from track 8 (the slow movement of the
third concerto), later rejigged for the ‘Military’ Symphony,
No.100. And, though the performances are well worth hearing,
King Ferdinand would hardly have been likely to enjoy them
in this form. Woodwind instruments, however well varied
in combination among the five works, cannot do full justice
to the music – where is the drone element provided by the
strings of the hurdy-gurdy part of the setup? The reception
of Helmut Müller-Brühl’s Haydn performances for Naxos has
been somewhat variable, but they have mostly been thoroughly
reliable, and this well-recorded disc is no exception as
far as it can go without the correct solo instruments.
Just about all of Haydn’s
music is unfailingly tuneful; this is mature music from the
mid 1780s, roughly contemporaneous with the Paris symphonies;
completists will want the recording in this bi-centenary
year of his death but, if you have yet to make the acquaintance
of some of his 107+ symphonies, I’d go there first – you
could do a great deal worse in most cases than Naxos’s own
recordings of these, now gathered into a giant box set for
around £90 – or, even better value when it appears in February
2009, Decca’s 33-CD set with the Philharmonia Hungarica/Antal
Doráti (478 1221, around £50 for a short time). And if you
don’t know the two wonderful cello concertos, in D and C,
and the first violin concerto, those works should be more
of a priority than the music here. Unless Philips restore
one or both of the Gendron recordings of the cello concertos,
as they surely must – the Concerto in D as soloist with Casals
conducting is a real classic though, unfortunately, paired
with the inauthentic Grutzmacher version of Boccherini – the
budget-price Deutsche Harmonia Mundi version on 74321 935482
is both inexpensive and recommendable. Gendron’s later version
of the concerto in C, coupled with the (authentic) Boccherini
in G was last seen on a budget-price Philips Concert Classics;
look out for second-hand copies, even with the rather gash
cover and the short playing time of 45:39 (422 481-2, with
the LSO and Raymond Leppard). Adrian Smith thought Kliegel
on Naxos 8.555041 an absolute winner in the two concertos
in D and the one in C. That earlier Naxos recording shares
the same orchestra and conductor with this CD and both are
well filled at over 73 minutes.
The new recording comes
with two different sets of notes, in English by Keith Anderson,
informative as usual, if rather brief, and in German at slightly
greater length and equally informatively, by Silke Schloen;
the latter adds information about a proposed second visit
to Naples which never transpired. Naxos usually have an
appropriate contemporary painting to illustrate the cover,
but the current Haydn Concerto Series, of which four more
recordings are advertised in the insert, all employ photographs
of palaces, in this case of the Charlottenberg Palace in
Berlin.
An attractive recording,
then, which one could hardly dislike, but far from essential
Haydn listening.
Brian Wilson
Haydn
Symphonies and Concertos on Naxos page
Daniel Rothert, Philip Spätling
(recorders); Benoît Fromanger, Ingo Nelken
(flutes); Christian Hommel (oboe) 
