Haydn: Piano Sonata No. 45 in A major, Hob.XVI:30

Olbertz’s recordings of all Haydn’s Piano Sonatas enable the development of one of the most important “avant-garde composers” of Viennese Classicism to be followed in an exemplary way. The almost fifty works abound in surprises, and Olbertz interprets them with great clarity, elegance and esprit.

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.