Haydn: Theme and Variations in C major, Hob.XVII:5 (Six Easy Variations)

Haydn’s songs are relatively subordinate in his oeuvre and were composed to be performed by amateurs. Nonetheless, they are carefully structured and served to help establish him in the open market. His English Canzonettas show a great variety of moods ranging from lively sea pieces to pastoral. Anne Cambrier has an extensive repertoire and regularly gives recitals with Jan Vermeulen.

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.