Il Giardino Armonico|Haydn 2032, Vol. 16: The Surprise

Haydn 2032, Vol. 16: The Surprise by Giovanni Antonini, Il Giardino Armonico, Kammerorchester Basel

Released on 25/10/2024 by Alpha Classics
Main artists: Il Giardino Armonico Kammerorchester Basel Giovanni Antonini
Genre: Classical

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The Haydn 2032 cycle of conductor Giovanni Antonini rolls on with this 2024 release, which reached classical best-seller lists in the late autumn of the year. With this album, Antonini reaches the final groups of Haydn's symphonies, for which listeners have many other choices even if the consistently clever Symphony No. 90 in C major, Hob. 1/90, is a somewhat neglected item. Throughout his cycle, Antonini has sought to match his forces to what would have been heard in Haydn's day, and here that means combining the two groups with which he has recorded the cycle: the Kammerorchester Basel and Il Giardino Armonico, for the larger ensemble that would have helped make the late Haydn symphonies big public spectacles -- rock concerts, to borrow a phrase from the Hungarian conductor Ádám Fischer. Each of Antonini's Haydn releases also contains a work by a different composer that is relevant to the pieces involved, and here it's an especially interesting one: the opening of Gioachino Rossini's one-act opera La scala di seta (1812). One doesn't tend to connect the young Rossini with Haydn, but of course he would have known Haydn's symphonies well, and so would his audiences. The Rossini Sinfonia has a big, slow introduction in common with all three of the Haydn symphonies on the album. Also a nice touch is the retention of the little harpsichord cadenza at the end of the Symphony No. 98 in B flat major, H. 1/98. So this is all to the good. The only issue here is the extremely tamped-down quality of the music. There is nothing wrong with a restrained approach to Haydn, and such approaches are justified considering that the late symphonies, broadly speaking, were probably overdone a bit during the era of traditional modern-orchestra Haydn. But here things are taken to an extreme. The chord that gives the "Surprise" Symphony (the Symphony No. 94 in G major, Hob. 1/94) its name, marked fortissimo, is here mezzo-forte at best, and it's hard to imagine Haydn's London audience even stirring in their seats or taking off their monocles. So it goes throughout, with a minimal dynamic range, plain, moderate tempos (except in the minuets, where this doesn't really work), and only sparsely shaped melodies. Utterly mysterious album graphics don't help. It's early music Haydn of the old school, and there are listeners who will like Haydn this way.

© James Manheim /TiVo

Haydn 2032, Vol. 16: The Surprise

Il Giardino Armonico

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Symphony No. 98 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:98: I. Adagio - Allegro

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Il Giardino Armonico, MainArtist, Orchestra - Kammerorchester Basel, MainArtist, Orchestra - Giovanni Antonini, MainArtist, Conductor - Franz Joseph Haydn, Composer - Jean-Daniel Noir, Producer, SoundEditor, MasteringEngineer - Didier Martin, ExecutiveProducer - Amélie Boccon-Gibod, Editor - Copyright Control, MusicPublisher