The
Haydn 2032
cycle of conductor
Giovanni Antonini
rolls on with this 2024 release, which reached classical best-seller lists in the late autumn of that year. With this album,
Antonini
reaches the final groups of
Haydn
's symphonies, for which listeners have many other choices even if the consistently clever
Symphony No. 90 in C major, Hob. 1/90
, is a somewhat neglected item. Throughout his cycle,
has sought to match his forces to what would have been heard in
's day, and here that means combining the two groups with which he has recorded the cycle, the
Kammerorchester Basel
and
Il Giardino Armonico
: the larger ensemble would have helped make the late
symphonies big public spectacles -- rock concerts, to borrow a phrase from the Hungarian conductor
Ádám Fischer
. Each
release also contains a work by a different composer that is relevant to the pieces involved, and here, it's an especially interesting one: the opening Sinfonia of
Rossini
's one-act opera
La scala di seta
(1812). One doesn't tend to connect the young
with
, but of course, he would have known
's symphonies well, and so would his audiences. The
Sinfonia has a big, slow introduction in common with all three of the
symphonies on the album. Also a nice touch is the retention of the little harpsichord cadenza at the end of the
Symphony No. 98 in B flat major, H. 1/98
. So this is all to the good. The only issue here is the extremely tamped-down quality of the music. There is nothing wrong with a restrained approach to
, and such approaches are justified considering that the late symphonies, broadly speaking, were probably a bit overdone during the era of traditional modern-orchestra
. But here things are taken to an extreme. The chord that gives the "Surprise"
Symphony No. 94 in G major, Hob. 1/94
) its name, marked fortissimo, is here mezzo-forte at best, and it's hard to imagine
's London audience even stirring in their seats or taking off their monocles. So it goes throughout, with a minimal dynamic range, plain, moderate tempos (except in the minuets, where this doesn't really work), and only sparsely shaped melodies. Utterly mysterious album graphics don't help. It's early music
of the old-school, and there are plenty of listeners who will like
this way. ~ James Manheim