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First Metropolitan United Church
April 27, 2018
The question of how many concertos Joseph Haydn wrote is not an easy one to answer; many works attributed to Haydn have later been discovered to be spurious, numerous concertos known to have existed are now lost and some works, despite having a solo instrument accompanied by an orchestra, were not dubbed "concerto" by their composer.
Given all of that, we can safely say that Haydn wrote somewhere in excess of thirty concertos for various instruments, including at least four for the violin, six for keyboard and six for two lire organizzata, a sort of hurdy-gurdy much favoured by King Ferdinand IV of Naples, for whom Haydn wrote the concertos, and who enjoyed playing them with his teacher.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that the only concertos which regularly appear on the concert platform today are the two for cello (a third is either lost or a confused reference to the first) and the one for trumpet.
The possible reasons are at least twofold: cellists (and, even more so, trumpeters) have few enough concertos in any case; but it is also the case, for whatever reason, that in these concertos Haydn seemed to have scaled heights that his other concertos failed to reach: his keyboard concertos, for example, are completely outclassed by those of Mozart.
And with the Cello Concerto No.1 in C, Haydn may well have written the first truly great concerto for the instrument.
Friday night's Victoria Chamber Orchestra concert featured a splendid performance of the C major concerto, with Lexie Krakowski, the winner of this year's Louis Sherman Concerto Competition, as the sparkling soloist.
It was a performance in which everything seemed to go just right, from the marvellously self-assured introduction — I'm not sure I've ever heard the orchestra sounding better — to the soloist's effortless elegance, which was in play from her first confident entry.
I particular enjoyed Krakowski's thoughtful playing of the first movement cadenza, the way she emerged almost imperceptibly from the orchestral texture in the slow movement, her playfulness in the finale and her fine tone and intonation throughout.
As I intimated, the orchestra were at the top of their game, producing a distinctly Haydnesque sound, with some lovely piano playing in the adagio and boundless, yet controlled, energy in the finale.
Competitions are by no means uncontroversial or universally admired, yet to give such a fine young musician the opportunity to play a great concerto with such superb support seems justification enough.
By contrast with his concertos, we are fortunate in that the great majority of Haydn's symphonies are still extant. Of the 107 symphonies Haydn is known to have composed, we have 104; the indefatigable H.C. Robbins-Landon (who else?) reconstructed two of the missing works as Symphonies "A" and "B", but the other seems irretrievably lost.
Which is not to say that all of the numbered 104 are regularly performed — having a nickname really helps in this regard — or that they even all saw the light of day in print at the time of their composition.
According to Robbins-Landon, from January 1764, when de la Chevadière publish six "symphonies" (actually the Op.1 string quartets) "until Haydn's death in 1809, Parisian publishers made a fortune on his music which, at least until the early 1780s, was mostly published without his approval and with no financial benefit to him whatever".
Despite this and the extraordinary popular success of the six "Paris" symphonies (numbers 82 to 87), the "elegantly constructed" number 84 was not published until around 1871, almost a century after its composition.
In terms of recordings, number 84 is well represented in complete sets of the Paris symphonies; it terms of actual performances — well, let us just say that I don't recall ever having the opportunity before.
So the presence of the symphony on the programme would have been reason enough in itself for celebrations even without the merits of the performance itself, which were manifold.
From the very opening, the orchestral sound was full and rich, the transition from the first movement's slow introduction to the main allegro was meticulously handled, the movement was perfectly paced and suitably jovial with a quite delicious ritardando leading into the recapitulation.
The slow movement is a set of variations and there is surely a case to be made for Haydn as music's greatest composer of variations. There is usually at least one variation to make one sit up and listen even more closely; in this case it was the gorgeous canonic final variation for winds with pizzicato strings. Lovely.
The minuet was sturdy and brisk, yet not overly so, while the finale was graceful and vivacious and, once again, displayed the expanded orchestra at their very best.
To my mind, the greatest compliment that one can pay an arrangement is that it does not sound like an arrangement.
One would imagine that, given their acknowledged debt to Chopin, that most pianistic of composers, Alexander Scriabin's Op.11 Preludes would not necessarily take kindly to being transcribed for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and strings.
Clearly Lanny Pollet disagrees and his orchestration of five of the preludes triumphantly proved him right.
The preludes opened the evening, and immediately the orchestral sound presaged good things to come. The first prelude (as performed, I have no idea where in the Scriabin's original scheme of twenty-four any of these five came) was wistful and slightly melancholic; the second was lovely with delicious cello line; the third featured a plaintive bassoon and a muted horn at the close, a marvellously effective touch; the fourth featured perky winds and the last certainly lived up to its marking of appassionato.
One can only hope, on this superb showing, that Pollet might essay some of the remaining nineteen preludes.
All in all, this was a truly splendid close to the Victoria Chamber Orchestra's season.
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