Haydn Symphonies Nos 93-95 Danish Chamber Orchesta/Ádám Fischer Naxos 8.574516 60:27 mins
In his introduction to the album’s booklet, Ádám Fischer points out that Haydn’s ‘London’ symphonies were greeted at their first performances by the sort of wild enthusiasm that’s reserved nowadays for rock concerts. He aims to recreate some of that excitement in the performing style he cultivates with the Danish Chamber Orchestra, with its crisply articulated string playing and strongly contrasted dynamics. His approach pays dividends in a piece such as the great finale of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony No. 94, with its scurrying string passages and its distinctive phrasing. The famous joke in the same symphony’s slow movement, which Fischer takes at a curiously swift tempo, is as explosive as could be; and there’s another characteristically Haydnesque witticism in the otherwise much more serious Largo cantabile of Symphony No. 93, where, just as the music reaches a peak of serenity, a rude fortissimobassoon note shatters the atmosphere. Fischer uses the prescribed solo string quartet at the beginning of the movement, and perhaps he could have done so, too, at the various reprises of the opening subject during the course of the piece.
Symphony No. 95 is alone among the 12 ‘London’ symphonies in being in the minor, and doing without a slow introduction. Fischer and his players bring out the full drama of its first movement, and the great fugal passages in the finale are done with exemplary clarity. The recorded balance tends to favour the winds at the expense of the strings: the first violins, in particular, would generally have benefitted from greater presence.
Misha Donat
