Franz Joseph Haydn

Resonus is proud to welcome internationally celebrated artists Nicky Spence (tenor) and Malcolm Martineau (piano) with the release of a recital album consisting of a musical journey of Shakespeare Songs set by a diverse and eclectic range of composers from Purcell and Haydn, through to Britten, Quilter, Tippett and John Dankworth, via Chausson and Schubert.

Entitled As You Like It: Shakespeare Songs, the album shows the supreme versatility of Spence's voice and abilities from Romantic lieder to jazz-inspired works, all superbly accompanied by the universally acclaimed pianist Malcolm Martineau.

Also included on the album is the world premiere recording of Three Tempestuous Tunes by young composer Alex Woolf. Born in 1995, and already an award-winning composer, Woolf is a principal composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and a recipient of the BBC Young Composer Award for 2012.

Mozart used to call him ‘Papa Haydn’. And it is true that Joseph Haydn had a powerful influence on Mozart’s music, as he did on Beethoven's, who dedicated his first piano sonatas to him. Yet that very influence has led to Haydn’s output being overshadowed, even though it is quite as brilliant and individual as theirs. The trios presented here eloquently demonstrate this and form an excellent introduction to the world of the first composer in the ‘Viennese Trinity’.

‘The Time of Day’ provided Haydn with an inspiration to compose and his Symphony numbers 6, 7 & 8 collectively became known as The Day Trilogy.

Celebrating their 30th anniversary, Sigiswald Kuijken and La Petite Bande are highly respected exponents of this repertoire and this recording is no exception to their consistently high standards.

Carrying on with their ‘one instrument to a part’ policy, the recording is presented in a wonderfully light and airy way, allowing the music to shine through.

Having won many competitions (in 2009 the quartet not only won First Prize in the Eleventh London International String Quartet Competition, but its performance was so convincing that it was awarded four additional prizes; The 20th Century Prize, the Beethoven Prize, the Sidney Griller Award and the Menton Festival Prize), C-Avi is delighted to release this disc of Haydn and Brahms String Quartets. Although this is obviously well-recorded repertoire, their performance is absolutely exhilirating and well worth listening to!

Haydn conceived these three first London quartets specifically for public performances, in the large hall of Hannover Square where the draper-violinist-impresario Johann Peter Salomon used to organise chamber and orchestral concerts. In this way, this trilogy requires a resolutely symphonic style in order to attain completeness, which is no problem for the Prazaks following their recent recording of Haydn's 'Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross' (DSD250291).

The period after 1750 meant a crisis for the high brass instruments, trumpet and horn. To be sure, the art of playing higher and higher on a simple or 'natural' brass instrument had reached its apogee, but the compositional style had changed. Owing to a new bourgeois idea of society, the trumpet fell out of favour, since it represented the old courtly culture. Felix Weingartner wrote of an anticipatory longing for reform which was in the air at that time. The final reform was brought about by full chromatifica-tion of trumpets and horns resulting from the invention of the valve (just before 1815). On the pathway to this final reform, however, the most intellectual brows were furrowed over the most efficient means of making brass instruments chromatic. The works on this disc represent three steps on this pathway: the explosive expansion of the frontiers of high-register playing by employing the 5th octave of the harmonic series, which had remained more or less unused, from high C upwards, around 1770 (Neruda); the Viennese court trumpeter Anton Weidinger's successful introduction of the keyed trumpet around 1800 (Haydn, Hummel); and finally the establishment of the 'Romantic' trumpet in low F or G with valves after c. 1828 (Kreutzer, Millares). On this disc, the works by Neruda, Haydn and Hummel are performed on modern instruments (although the horn employed in the Neruda concerto was built over 100 years ago). The 'Romantic' trumpet used in the works by Kreutzer and Millares is pitched in low D and E flat, respectively.