About this Artist

• Biography
• Interview

Editorial Reviews

"The Seasons" today is less well known than Haydn's other late oratorio, "The Creation." In it, the aged Haydn seems to try to force pastoral imagery -- a pretty stale set of ideas by the dawn of the nineteenth century -- into a musical language that really laid the foundation of Romanticism. He even complained in a letter of having to compose "French trash" at one point in the score where there is an imitation of frogs, and the score is filled with shepherds, shepherdesses, horn calls, birds, trees, bees, herbs, fish, roosters, rifle shots, thunder and lighting, stags, sunrises, and sunsets besides (to name a few). But at many points Haydn succeeded as only Haydn could. The thrilling sunrise near the beginning of the Summer section is one place where Haydn seems somehow to paint his musical pictures on a giant canvas, and to make you feel that Mahler and his musical encompassing of the world were just a few steps away. The early performances of the oratorio in Vienna in 1801 were major events, with enormous orchestras; one performance at the Hofburgtheater involved 400 musicians.

Which brings up the question of whether a historical-instrument performance, like that offered here by conductor René Jacobs, the Freiburger Barockorchester, and the RIAS-Kammerchor, is up to the job for "The Seasons." Doesn't such a performance compel the music to look backward when it was really trying to look forward? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. True, someone ought to try a really "authentic" performance of "The Seasons" with the Berlioz-sized brass section that the original set of parts for the work specifies. But Jacobs and his smaller band can bring to the foreground many pictorial details that seem like, well, seasonings in modern-orchestra performances. Haydn's orchestra, in addition to being large, included a variety of then-novel instruments like a piccolo, a triangle, and a tambourine, and Jacobs gives the listener a nice sense of the composer's lovely tricks of orchestration. The sound is plenty big when it needs to be; whoever made the unorthodox choice of the Innsbruck Congress convention center for the recording location had an inspired idea. And the three vocal soloists, (soprano Marlis Petersen, tenor Werner Güra, and baritone Dietrich Henschel) are uniformly good; Petersen in particular will make you laugh out loud with the comic seduction (or non-seduction) song "Ein Mädchen, das auf Ehre hielt" in the Winter section. For the first-time buyer, this reading can stand beside the durable Colin Davis version with the BBC Symphony on the Philips label. Sample the two versions and let personal preference guide you from there.

This is a performance of the work's original version, reconstructed after Haydn himself sliced a few numbers out of the work to make it more compact. Two more details are worth noting. The recitatives here are accompanied not by the usual harpsichord but by a fortepiano -- a very satisfying sound, and one that would have seemed just right in 1801. But a troublesome note is struck by the cover of the U.S. release of this Harmonia Mundi disc, which bills the work as "The Seasons" rather than by its German title, "Die Jahreszeiten," even though the recording is in German -- preferable in itself. For a work that can be and often is sung in both languages (its text is a German translation of an English poem, and the music isn't hard to rework back into English), this is misleading. Nothing on the wrapped package tells potential buyers what they're getting. James Manheim, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

• Listener Rating: