The LSQ celebrates Haydn's ideas with wit and charm as well as brilliance in the expansive solo passages which revive the hype of 1790s Vienna and London. This is Haydn at the height of his creative powers and a quartet to the highest performance standards. The natural, unobtrusive recording technique elevates these Classical masterpieces to their rightful pedestal.

Nathan Ben-Yehuda pursues a fulltime solo concert career as a classical pianist but also plays with Astral Mixtape, an innovative crossover quartet writing new works and reimagining classics from Monteverdi to Rimsky-Korsakov, and playing with ideas and thematic material from Sigur Ros to Radiohead and Four Tet. We end this album with two tracks by Astral Mixtape. Track 6 offers Goddess Gardens, including intoxicating “mixtape” snippets from Scheherazade and Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending, as well as more recent fare. Seven Hellos closes the album on track 7, an original composition by the four members of the quartet. Astral Mixtape is clearly close to Nathan’s heart: “I am part of this wonderful band of fellow classical musicians who are seeking to reimagine the conventional roles of our instruments, and applying non-classical approaches to arrangement and composition in our works. Astral Mixtape is the collaborative project most personal to me.” Before we get to Astral Mixtape, however, Nathan’s solo piano repertoire makes a powerful statement. Not only can Nathan handle the thorny Knussen Variations, but he plays Haydn beautifully, and he recorded my favorite performances to date of both Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Villa-Lobos’ Rudepoêma. Nathan kindly agreed to play Gaspard for this project, but also Peter Sculthorpe’s Nocturnal. –Bob Attiyeh, producer

During the 18th century, the string quartet gained the position of the most valued and most challenging chamber music genre, and gradually became a vehicle for conveying the composer’s personal feelings. Joseph Haydn played a key role in forging the quartet’s classical form. He created almost 70 string quartets, which, along with the symphonies, constitute the largest, as well as the most significant, part of his oeuvre. Haydn accorded them the form that would serve as the model for Mozart, Beethoven, and later composers. Just as fascinating as the quantity is his quartets’ sheer diversity, with each of them being singular, featuring novel (often humorous) ideas, experiments, as well as constant seeking of new possibilities of expression.

The three quartets included on the present album chart the development of Haydn’s musical idiom, from Op. 17 (1771), which he wrote at the age of 40, through Op. 33, dubbed “Gli Scherzi” (1781, dedicated to the Grand Duke of Russia Pavel Petrovich, the future Tsar Paul I), to the formally experimental pieces making up Op. 54 (1788). The Bennewitz Quartet have given numerous concerts worldwide, including at the most prestigious venues (Wigmore Hall in London, Musikverein in Vienna, Konzerthaus in Berlin, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, concert halls in New York, Seoul, etc.) and such renowned festivals as the Salzburger Festspiele, Lucerne Festival and Rheingau Musik Festival. At many of them, they have performed quartets by Haydn, one of their favourite composers, whose music they endow with a transparent sound, revealing their levity and sense for detail. The Bennewitz Quartet – at home with Haydn

“Gut strings and classical bows are also the tools of a captivating quest for sonority”, French magazine Diapason recently wrote to describe the Chiaroscuro Quartet. After Op. 20, Joseph Haydn’s first major string quartet cycle, and Op. 76, his last, the internationally renowned ensemble is now embarking on the Quartets Op. 33, dubbed the “Russian Quartets” and dedicated to the Russian Grand Duke Paul, the future Tsar Paul I. Having earned a reputation as eccentric and non-conformist, sometimes downright offensive, Haydn felt the need to write music more in keeping with the public’s lighter, more ‘popular’, less ‘scholarly’ tone, with a livelier sense of rhythm. And while there is comedy in some of the scherzos, it would be wrong to reduce these works to what some dour critics have called ‘comic fooling’.

In Quartet No 1 in B minor, the comedy is cerebral, often disturbing. This is certainly not the case in Quartet No 2 in E flat major, nicknamed “The Joke” because of the sparkling tarantella that concludes it. In Quartet No 3 in C major, “The Bird”, Haydn invites us to a veritable bird concert before concluding brilliantly with its persistent refrain inspired by a wild Slavic folk dance.

As one of the most celebrated composers of the late 18th century, Joseph Haydn can lay claim to being ‘father of the piano trio’ alongside that of other genres established in his lifetime such as the symphony and the string quartet. The delightful Divertimento in C major is a youthful work, but the later piano trios recorded here take on a heightened sophistication. Strings and keyboard are given a new independence of character in exquisitely crafted works such as the C minor Trio, with its ‘numerous and sometimes spectacular modulations’, and oscillating en_x005F_x0002_harmonic key changes that foreshadow Schubert can be heard in the Trio in D major.

René Jacobs presents Joseph Haydn’s Stabat Mater, together with the Kammerorchester Basel, Zürcher Singakademie and an excellent quartet of vocal soloists (Birgitte Christensen, Kristina Hammarström, Steve Davislim and Christian Immler).

With this recording, Jacobs finally returns to a composer that is very dear to him, and offers a first vocal album on Pentatone after acclaimed interpretations of Schubert’s complete symphonies. Setting a text that depicts the most tragic event of Christ’s life, Haydn manages to find a balance between dramatic pathos and expression and a more composed, distanced portrayal, fitting his Classical aesthetic orientation. Initially composed in 1767, this recording employs a 1803 edition with enlarged wind orchestration created with the help of Haydn’s apprentice Sigismund Neukomm, which makes the work even more dramatic and colourful. Jacobs and his players and singers display a great sense of style and drama in this remarkable rendition.

Multiple prize-winning conductor René Jacobs is one of the most important representatives of the historically-informed performance practice. Haydn’s Stabat Mater is his fifth Pentatone album, after a complete Schubert symphonies cycle released between 2018 and 2021. The Kammerorchester Basel, Zürcher Sing-Akademie, Birgitte Christensen, Kristina Hammarström, Steve Davislim and Christian Immler all make their Pentatone debut.

The Ruisi Quartet makes its recording debut on Pentatone with Big House, bringing together music by Matthew Locke, Joseph Haydn and Oliver Leith. Spanning nearly four centuries, this combination of composers establishes a harmonious as well as dissonant relationship between past, present and future. Celebrated for their deeply engaging performances of early repertoire alongside championing progressive new music, the critically-acclaimed Ruisi Quartet has established an international reputation as a charismatic and expressive young ensemble.

REVIEW:

The Ruisis unify the program with gorgeous, historically informed playing – delicately shaded and minimally vibrated, yet warm and welcoming. The new commission, Oliver Leith’s Big House, melts the harmonic language of his forebears to uneasy effect.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Over the past decades, the German Music Competition has repeatedly given a stage to great chamber music formations! And, for many years, GENUIN, the German Music Council, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur have presented these ensembles in high-profile CD productions. In this recording, we become acquainted with the promising Trio E.T.A., featuring Elene Meipariani (violin), Till Schuler (cello), and Till Hoffmann (piano), performing works by Joseph Haydn, Roman Pawollek, and Bedrich Smetana. The piano trio at its best with a well-balanced program of classical, passionate romantic, and exciting new territory!

“This recording is the result of a project launched a few years ago by the Brühl Castle Concerts series (Brühler Schlosskonzerte) and Capella Augustina within the framework of the Haydn Festival, which they organize. We commission works that are related in a certain manner with the oeuvre of Joseph Haydn and are explicitly conceived for an orchestra playing on period instruments. In 2018, we commissioned a piece from Spanish composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, one of whose works I had the privilege of premiering a while back: a mesmerizing, fantastically well-orchestrated work.

Born in Andalusia, Sánchez-Verdú chose to enact a new musical encounter with Haydn’s work Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (“The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross”). Indeed, as is well known, Haydn wrote Die sieben letzten Worte for a passion liturgy held on Good Friday in the Spanish port town of Cádiz.Sánchez-Verdú has written Sheba (the Hebrew word for “seven”) as a series of interludes to be inserted between the movements of Haydn’s original work. Each of Haydn’s seven “sonatas” is followed by a 2-to-3-minute movement that serves as a commentary, an exegesis, a prolongation, or an antithesis to what has been previously heard. Sánchez-Verdú’s seventh and final movement leads without pause into the “earthquake” music that closes Die sieben letzten Worte.

Sánchez-Verdú occasionally takes an isolated chord or timbre from Die sieben letzten Worte as a point of departure; in other cases, he has found inspiration in one of Haydn’s musical impulses or gestures. In the process of composing Sheba, the period instruments served as a challenge and as a stimulus...“ (Excerpt from the booklet notes by Andreas Spering)

After Haydn composed The Seven Last Words for chamber orchestra as a devotional accompaniment to the Good Friday liturgy at Cadiz Cathedral in 1786, several other arrangements were made during his lifetime, by himself and others, all of them familiar to us now: as an oratorio with soloists and chorus, and in string quartet and solo keyboard transcriptions. The cycle continued to attract arrangers after Haydn’s death. In the course of researching them, the flautist Rafael Ruibérriz de Torres turned up a manuscript by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, who transcribed it for flute and string quartet in 1840 – perhaps as a compositional exercise at the behest of his teacher, Ramon Carnicer, who had recently produced a flute quintet of his own. In any case, Barbieri’s arrangement presents a Romantic-era conception of Haydn’s work in which the flute part acquires the same importance as the other instruments, lending color and brilliance to the quartet parts. At points the flute line plays in unison with one or other of the strings (almost throughout Sonata II, for example), but elsewhere his melodic and contrapuntal contributions are woven into the fabric of Haydn’s score with masterly technique and no small measure of creative inspiration.

Along with Handel's Messiah, which was greatly admired by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), the oratorio The Creation is one of the few works of this genre written before 1800 that from the outset has enjoyed uninterrupted popularity with audiences and choirs alike. In this timeless classic dating from 1798, Haydn creates a musical world with such a variety of different expressive means that its radiant charisma is irresistible. Hans-Christoph Rademann describes it with the words: “If it is possible to convey our gratitude for God's glorious creation through music, then I believe that Josef Haydn has succeeded brilliantly with this oratorio. I see Haydn's Creation as a reminder to preserve our earth. Out of the note C he creates a resonant world for us.”

The work opens with a symphonic “Representation of Chaos”, a setting of “Nichts” (nothingness) verging on the hideous, which is then swept away by the powerful setting of the word “light” sung by the chorus. They then sing “Und eine neue Welt entspringt auf Gottes Wort” (“A new created world springs up at God’s command”), radiating joy, and a vivid musical story begins. In this work Haydn teaches us to “see with the ears”, we hear the emergence of the elements, see the whole range of animals in our mind’s eye, and experience the birth of the first humans: the wonder of creation.

In the summer of 1968, a few days after the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring, the exiled Czech Rafael Kubelík conducted a gripping concert in his adopted home of Lucerne: a vital Haydn symphony and a passionately glowing Fourth by Tchaikovsky framed Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. Kubelík takes up the cause of the Tchaikovsky symphony as if it were a declaration of the victory of the spirit, of freedom over all the forces of fate, was the verdict of a critic at the time on the closing concert of the Lucerne Summer Festival in 1968. The historical parallels to the current situation with the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine are unmistakable: A few days before Rafael Kubelík's performance, the socialist reform movement in Prague had been brutally crushed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. Kubelík, a Czech in exile who had chosen to live in Lucerne, not only pleaded for a break in artistic relations - a call that musicians such as Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin and Igor Stravinsky joined. He had also asked the Lucerne concert-goers for support for his "Foundation for Czechoslovak Emigrants after August 21, 1968".

Kubelík's dramatically sharpened reading of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony captivates the audience with strikingly abrupt changes in tempo and tone, and heightens the orchestral virtuosity in the finale to a furor. He had opened the guest performance of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, as the Philharmonia Orchestra temporarily called itself after a secession and refoundation, with Haydn's Symphony in E-flat Major Hob. I:99. Another highlight: Schoenberg's Piano Concerto with John Ogdon as soloist, who never recorded this work. With an unerring sense of the abruptly shifting characters of this music and its ongoing variational processes, Ogdon and Kubelík succeeded in producing a textually accurate, gripping interpretation. All three live recordings are first releases.

The genesis of the oratorio The Seven Last Words of Christ is one of the most exciting stories in music history. In 1786, Haydn (who by then was already a famous composer throughout Europe) was commissioned by José Saluz de Santamaria, a priest from Cadiz, to write a piece of purely instrumental music for Holy Week. The maestro himself considered the piece to be one of his finest achievements. The instrument on this recording is a copy of an instrument made in 1805 by Viennese fortepiano maker Anton Walter.

“Perhaps Mozart sings more, but Haydn speaks, he chatters, he rejoices and talks about the really important things in life.” After Matthias Kirschnereit’s exploration with the Radio Hesse Symphony Orchestra of the middle ground between the Classical and Romantic eras in works by Hummel, Weber and Mendelssohn, the pianist now turns to Papa Haydn. And that means he is entering the terrain, somewhat neglected even now, of the great Austrian’s piano concertos. All nine keyboard concertos that were definitely written by Haydn are now being released with Matthias Kirschnereit and the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra of Heilbronn, which he directs from the instrument. The recording is a co-production with Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Haydn’s “concertos for keyboard instruments”, which are collected in Section XVIII of the Hoboken catalogue, were surely written for a variety of instruments. Pieces originally intended for fortepiano, harpsichord or even organ come to life in the hands of Matthias Kirschnereit on a modern Steinway concert grand. “Here and there I even take the liberty of intervening in the score and – as Joseph Haydn might have done, I trust – I use little ornaments, scales, embellishments and octave sequences to make the whole thing sound even more contemporary,” says the professor at Rostock’s University of Music and Drama. His feeling for Haydn’s keyboard language is particularly evident in the cadenzas. They are not given by Haydn in the original score, giving the soloist the opportunity to turn composer for his complete edition of the concertos. He has arranged them in the true spirit of Haydn, quoting his role model, who would surely have relished the exercise, to his heart’s content.

Frieder Bernius and the Kammerchor Stuttgart have taken on one of the most exciting pieces of Passion music in music history: "The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross." The new recording with Anna-Lena Elbert, Sophie Harmsen, Florian Sievers, Sebastian Noack and the Kammerchor Stuttgart under the direction of Frieder Bernius achieves an emotionality that can hardly be surpassed. (Carus)