Franz Joseph Haydn

From modest beginnings in eighteenth-century Italy, the symphony soon developed into the highest form of western instrumental music at the hands of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The symphony became a big, public form that used the community of the orchestra to address the community of the audience. After two and a half centuries of the most varied masterpieces, the symphony still remains an ideal means for the individual voice to convey a world of ideas and feelings to a wide audience. Discover the Symphony, comprising two CDs and a 100-page booklet, traces the colourful and exciting story of a musical form that has expressed the most intimate emotions of the greatest composers and at the same time reflected the fascinating and often turbulent state of the world in which they lived.

These discs present a rich and varied flavour of Britain’s capital city. Offering a diverse and wide-ranging taste of music spanning over three centuries, the pieces on this compilation are evocative of London in all its glory, whether that be light musical cameos of famous locations, to the archetypal Coronation Anthems of Handel and the eponymous symphonies of Haydn and Vaughan Williams. This 2-CD set contains music by some of Britain’s most popular native and adopted composers. The first disc on this compilation offers a nostalgic trip back through British light music, easily recognized for its emphasis on instantly accessible and catchy melodies. Tracks include the popular Yeoman of the Guard overture by Arthur Sullivan, as well as extracts from the London Suites by Dam Busters composer Eric Coates and Dankworth’s Rediffusion London Call Sign. The second disc comprises more traditional pieces, ranging from delicate lute arrangements of Henry VIII’s attributed ditty Greensleeves to Walton’s joyous coronation march Crown Imperial.

It was in Haydn's hands that the keyboard sonata developed from a simple drawing-room divertimento to the level of a high art-form and the greatest among his sonatas have an intellectual rigour and a dramatic sweep that were rarely equalled by Mozart, and not surpassed until Beethoven revolutionized the form in the closing years of the eighteenth century. His earliest sonatas were composed with the harpsichord in mind, but in later years he began increasingly to exploit dynamic contrasts of a kind that could only be obtained on the fortepiano.