Haydn: Arietta con 12 variazioni in E flat major, Hob.XVII/3

This useful set gathers up the many shorter works that Haydn wrote for the keyboard: many minuets of light character and charming temperament and variation sets of great melodic invention. He arranged many movements from his chamber and orchestral works, doubtless encouraged by his fame and his publisher to bring his music to even greater domestic popularity in a world where live music was far more often heard on the piano at home than in great concert halls. Finally, there is his great cycle of Seven Last Words: seven poignant slow movements with an introduction and final ‘Earthquake’ originally commissioned for choir and orchestra for Lisbon Cathedral, but which quickly achieved a reputation for their sober beauty out of proportion to the specific conditions of their context: hence this arrangement made by another party. Bart van Oort is a scholar-performer who has extensively researched and performed the music of Haydn and his time (including contributions made to Brilliant Classics’ complete set of the composer’s piano sonatas). Here he performs on a fine modern reproduction of a fortepiano by Walter, a maker esteemed by Haydn and Beethoven.

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.

This complete Haydn music for solo keyboard box set includes 15 CDs featuring 55 sonatas as well as sets of dances and variations and various independent pieces. Included is also an unusual keyboard arrangement of The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, published in 1787 with the composer’s approval. These recordings were originally released between 1999 and 2004, in instalments which received universal acclaim, including a Cannes Classical Award in 2004.