Haydn's Haus

[Herman]

I heard the recording was very reverb-y and tended to dampen the enjoyment of this set? The sound is the same throughout the set?

A delicious turn of phrase. "I heard the recording..." however then it turns out you only heard about the recording.

And so the meta-chatter continues.

And no, I'm not saying you should have every single recording.

I'm saying it's not very useful to build entire posts, if not threads upon hearsay, especially if it's badly digested hearsay.

[Sean]

snyp, re the Angeles set you're right about the bathroomy acoustic, particularly affecting the cello but I don't find it a distraction and this group have a real grasp of the different styles of each movement- I'm presently listening to #75 (why do people still bother with 'op.76/1?') and though at times they make it sound like it's a lost late Beethoven quartet there's plenty of enthusiasm for the idiom in question and the playing exudes high classical confidence.

[MN Dave]

I like a touch of resonance. Is that bad?

[snyprrr]

I'm eagerly awaiting your opinion on the matter.

Q

I'm still re-grouping on Monday!!! ... shellshocked I tell ya!



This whole thing sent me into a buying frenzy over the weekend. I'm currently in a seven day treatment center.



ahhhh,... 9/17, 9/17, 9/17, tick, tock, tick, tock, gagagaga... (lots of drooling)

[snyprrr]

Plus, I made a very interesting purchase.

Gotta go to work...
MORE!!!... SHOCKING HEADLINES!!!... LATER!!!

[snyprrr]

I like a touch of resonance. Is that bad?

Dave + Haydn??? Hmmm

Dave, you know when the mics are placed just far enough back to where the reverb effects the attack of the instrument,... the "swamping" effect. You caaaaan still have canyons of reverb, AND have crisp attack. Apparently, the Angeles don't have it.

[Brahmsian]

I like a touch of resonance. Is that bad?

Need to find a version where the violins, viola and cello have WahWah sticks attached to them like electric guitars! 

[snyprrr]

Ina Gadda da... Lobkowitz???

[snyprrr]

There's just so much going on on this thread, it's hard to keep up! Whilst eagerly anticipation another 9/17 salvo, I got sidetracked into shoring up my Opp.71-76 hole.

Today the Auryn's original 1993 recording of Op.71 (Tacet) arrived. This cd has a bit of a reputation as being an exceptional 71, a) for the unique sound of the group, b) for the audiophile recording.

I only heard Op.71 for the first time earlier this year (Amadeus), and you can read my reactions, that this was my least favorite, or, most shoulder shrugging set, for me. I do remember thinking the Amadeus did an exceptional job in this set; plus, their gutsy, woodsy, folksy, yet serious tone brought much pleasure.

I know the Auryn have a completely different type of sound, and, as I began to listen, I was greeted with a very perfect sounding ensemble, very much like the ABQ with four slightly more subjective players. The recorded sound, also, grabbed me from the instant, being very unique sounding to my ears (the mic placement has this "hue" that's very strikingly appealing, which then just sounds normal as the ear adjusts). I think I was a bit put off by the sheer difference of sound, both playing and recorded, of this cd until I realized it was just too perfect. I noticed that the Auryn's reputation for being "just so" really zeros your ear in on their choices, and as much as you want to critic something, you can't. This is one of those "silence criticism" type records, though, of course, there's no wood. This is a very silky smooth, perfect sounding record that just sounds like delicate marble sculpture, cold yet warm, with a very objective presentation, yet a very subjective jollity from the band that never ever goes over the top or under the bottom, but just simply, maddeningly, plays every note perfectlly poised and relaxed at the same time. Ha, in other words, I like the Amadeus/Lindsay "wood" approach, but I also like the Auryn's "marble" sound (actually, they might even be a little more refined sounding than the ABQ; their ultra refined sound does kind of draw attention to itself, but in a good way, I think).

Ha, however, the music of Op.71 still struck my ears as one of the weaker sets in the canon, but the more I listen to the Auryn's heavenly playing (third time around now) the more I hear that I like (duh, haha!!!). No.1 starts out with a somewhat humorous Mozartean melody that also reminds me of Dittersdorf's "Hello Muddah" variations, and I don't know if it's the playing, but I definitely hear some more Mozart here than in say 54/55; here, that spirit of Viennese limpidity hangs like garlands around these pieces. I've been trying to listen to them as public pieces, but I just don't get how they're supposed to be different. I know about the intros, and I do hear perhaps certain "symphonic" things, though that could also be the combination of playing and recording.

Though I find much of this set as elusive to follow as Op.50, I have noticed a special quality in the slow mvmts. All three are very deeply felt, as I hear them, though, as I'm listening to the andante con moto of No.3, I would say that they are not really emotional at the core, but perhaps experimental; here also is where I hear a lot of that Mozart slow mvmt. type influence, no?



Well, I know I'm not rhapsodizin' too eloquently here, but i'm just surprised by this recording. I do kind of miss that woodsy edge of the Lindsays/Amadeus, and will obviously (and deliciously, haha) have to find an alternative version, but I'm really sold on the Auryn's "Greek gods on Olympus" classical purity. They make you think you're listening to liquid gold! Yes, a very Viennese, ABQ sounding group, to be sure, but with a definite profile of their own.

And I just ordered the Auryn's brand new Op.76 (only $15!!!), which leads me to...

[Gurn Blanston]

One of the founders of musicology as a modern science, and the man who made Haydn the name today that it should have always been, but sadly wasn't. All Haydnites should be glad to have had him.    (obit courtesy of The Guardian)

• Howard Chandler Robbins Landon,
Musicologist, born 6 March 1926; died 20 November 2009

Few musicologists achieve true celebrity outside their specialist field. But the name of HC Robbins Landon, who has died at the age of 83, was known by many thousands of people beyond the scholarly community. While his reputation was founded on his trailblazing research into Joseph Haydn, which helped to establish the composer's works – largely unknown as late as the 1950s – in the canon, it was his series of books on Mozart, aimed at a wider public and selling in huge numbers in many languages, that brought him global renown.

It is no exaggeration to call him a titan, for Robbie, as he was universally known, was a giant in both physical and intellectual terms. And yet his infectious enthusiasm for the subject under discussion, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and almost recklessly fluent delivery, allowed him to engage lay audiences in a way that few scholars are able.

Born in Boston and educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, Landon studied music theory, composition and English literature, the latter under WH Auden. His interest in Haydn had already been piqued as a schoolboy, but an encounter with the scholar Karl Geiringer, his teacher at Boston University (1945-47), helped him on his chosen path. Realising that his future lay in Europe, where all the relevant sources were located, he managed to secure work as a music critic and European correspondent for various US newspapers and journals, including Musical America.

Employment by the Times, for which he worked for nearly a decade, was a crucial factor in gaining him admittance to archives behind the iron curtain. The papers of Haydn's employers, the princes of Esterházy, in the National Library in Budapest, had recently been taken over by the state. General access was all but impossible, but the Times connection ensured that he was treated with courtesy and even offered a visa.

In 1949 the Haydn Society was founded at his instigation. Originally located in Boston, but later operating out of Vienna also, the society planned a complete edition of Haydn's works, of which only a tenth had been published at that time; the project was subsequently abandoned, though much valuable musicological work was undertaken by the society. Equally notable were the recordings it issued, which included a number of Haydn's works, not least symphonies and masses, that had been previously unavailable on disc. The first recordings of Mozart's C minor Mass and Idomeneo were also made by the society.

Partly in conjunction with the activities of the Haydn Society, Landon began to produce critical editions and other material relating to the composer at this time. The first major publishing milestone was The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn (1955), which presented those works in the context of Haydn's output as a whole and of 18th-century music in general. Meanwhile he published editions of a number of Haydn's other works, notably masses and operas, helping to stimulate performances and effectively bringing about a reappraisal of Haydn's abilities as a dramatic composer.

The crowning achievement of his Haydn scholarship was the five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works (1976-80). The prodigious detail in which Landon lays out in these volumes the documentary material unearthed from the archives is a compliment as much to his faithful publishers, Thames & Hudson, as it is to Landon himself. It is difficult to imagine a similar project being undertaken today. To take examples at random, in volume one the salaries and payments in kind made in 1760 to Haydn's musicians at Eisenstadt are listed: they include precise allocations of wheat, corn, lard, candles, cabbage and beets, and, for some privileged players, a pig or two.

The third volume, covering the London years, includes, among its scores of documents, diary accounts by Haydn of his visit to Ascot, intimate information about Haydn's visits to a surgeon (wishing to remove a polyp from the composer's nose, the surgeon summoned "a few brawny fellows" to hold him down, but Haydn resisted) and much more besides.

Further esoterica are found in the copious footnotes, placed, where they belong but are too rarely found, on the page. If, in the case of Haydn, Landon's efforts effected a radical reappraisal of the composer by bringing many of the works into the public domain for the first time, with Mozart his influence was of a different order. By the time he produced his five Mozart publications – 1791: Mozart's Last Year, Mozart: The Golden Years, The Mozart Compendium, Mozart and Vienna, and The Mozart Essays – between 1988 and 1995, Mozart was firmly established in the pantheon of great composers. Thanks to the huge success of Peter Shaffer's 1979 play and 1984 film Amadeus, not only was Mozart's music suddenly on the bestseller lists, but a new mythology had grown up around the last months of Mozart's life: the relationship with Salieri, the Requiem, the "mysterious messenger", the final illness, the pauper's burial.

Landon's achievement was to cut through the fantasy and mystification to present the facts regarding the composer's last year, unveiling new documentary material in the process. He found no grounds for Mozart's having been poisoned by Salieri, or anyone else, taking the most likely cause of Mozart's death to be a combination of medical factors including progressive kidney failure, and restored the reputation of his wife, Constanze, slandered over decades as a scatterbrained, lascivious woman, incapable of understanding Mozart and encouraging him to live a disorderly, if not dissolute, existence. As text editor of 1791: Mozart's Last Year, I was privileged to play a small role in the dissemination of this revisionist view of Mozart.

Landon had always been generous in his acknowledgment of editorial and other assistance. In his earlier work on Haydn, his first wife, Christa Landon, a distinguished harpsichordist and scholar in her own right, killed in an air crash in 1977, had been an indispensable colleague. His second wife, Else Radant, also a historian of some note, was to provide further invaluable support for the next couple of decades. He relied too on a secretariat and assorted assistants, publicists and editors to manage his schedule and other administrative trivia, allowing him to concentrate on the matters in which he had the expertise. For all the exhaustiveness of his research and annotation, detail was not necessarily his strong suit.

Nor were the niceties of prose style, which made the process of coaxing the material he provided into a coherent narrative an interesting challenge.

His freely expressed gratitude to assistants, as to fellow-scholars, made him a pleasure to work with, however. It was an instructive experience too: one could but marvel at his ability to bring to life the dry documentary material retrieved from dusty library shelves. Both on the printed page and in the radio studio he communicated an enthusiasm that for once endowed musicology with the excitement of a detective story. It was this lightness of touch allied to his scholarly credentials and an almost missionary desire to share knowledge with the world at large that brought him unprecedented financial rewards as well as critical acclaim. In an interview conducted a couple of years before he died, he reported that he had just received a royalty cheque for his five Mozart books amounting to $80,000. Even allowing for the multiple reissues and translations of 1791, the figure represents an astonishing, and surely unequalled, return on a scholarly endeavour of this nature.

An episode that Landon and others of us would probably prefer to gloss over occurred a few years after the publication of 1791. Towards the end of 1993, a group of six piano sonatas thought to be by Haydn came to light, their authenticity verified by the performer-scholars Paul and Eva Badura-Skoda and by Landon. The January issue of the BBC Music Magazine, of which I was then reviews editor, carried an article by Landon proclaiming their merits. The February issue carried a retraction, it having been discovered that the sonatas were a skilful modern fraud perpetrated by a German recorder player and composer called Winfried Michel. The episode illustrates perhaps Landon's penchant for precipitate and over-zealous judgment, but it provoked at the same time a worthwhile debate about the extent to which our perception of the greatness of works is determined by our knowledge of their composer.

Other composers on whom he worked and published included Vivaldi, Handel, JC Bach and Beethoven. Some of the work outside his specialist field was criticised for its lack of scholarly rigour, though none could dispute the brio he brought to his subject. The book Five Centuries of Music in Venice (1991), written in conjunction with John Julius Norwich, was conceived as a companion to a television series called Maestro, created by Landon and Norwich, and broadcast by Channel 4 in association with the French broadcaster La Sept. His autobiographical Horns in High C, published in 1999, related the events of his career with characteristically breathless enthusiasm.

His academic appointments included professorships at Queens College, New York (1969) and the University of California at Davis (1970). He was John Bird Professor of Music at the University of Wales, Cardiff (1978-93) and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1979). He was also awarded honorary doctorates by Boston University, Queen's University, Belfast, Bristol University and the New England Conservatory, as well as the Siemens prize (1991) and the medal of honour of the Handel and Haydn Society (1993).

Fluent in several languages, Robbie made his home at different times in America, Britain, Vienna and France. It was to his beautiful 18th-century chateau at Rabastens, near Toulouse, that he finally retired, spending his last decade or so with his companion Marie-Noelle Raynal-Bechetoille, who, like Else Radant, survives him (there were no children from either marriage). An epicurean and bon vivant, he was no less generous with his hospitality than with his scholarship.

To spend time in his company was as exhausting as it was stimulating: nuggets of musical fact would be extricated from the vast repository of knowledge that was his brain. A tendency to solipsism was balanced by a remarkable capacity for thoughtfulness. I was deeply touched to receive a telephone call from him one Christmas Day when he guessed I would be on my own. Others will have different stories to tell of his boundless generosity. Larger than life, he was an inspirational presence, bringing a penetrating intellect and theatrical flair to the world of musicology.

[Franco]

Sad news, and yes, he was one of the most, if not the most, important music historians researching and writing about the Classical period composers and style.  His books are required reading for anyone wishing to learn what this music is about. 

I never knew what the H. C. stood for until today.

[Gurn Blanston]

I never knew what the H. C. stood for until today.

I am the proud owner of 6 of his books. I didn't know either... 

[Brahmsian]

Didn't HC Robbins Landon do a transcription or completion of Mozart's Great Mass in C minor?  Maybe I am thinking of someone else.

Wow, I've seen this name several times, but I thought it was someone from the 18th or 19th Century? 

[Gurn Blanston]

Didn't HC Robbins Landon do a transcription or completion of Mozart's Great Mass in C minor?  Maybe I am thinking of someone else.

Wow, I've seen this name several times, but I thought it was someone from the 18th or 19th Century? 

No. You might mean Robert Levin... 

Well, been around a long time, that's for sure. Not quite THAT long though...

[Brahmsian]

No. You might mean Robert Levin... 

Well, been around a long time, that's for sure. Not quite THAT long though...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mass_in_C_minor_(Mozart)

Under "Fragmentary Status"

[Gurn Blanston]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mass_in_C_minor_(Mozart)

Under "Fragmentary Status"

Yup. They're both listed there, in fact. I have the Levin completion, haven't seen any offerings of the Landon one...

[snyprrr]

Endellion Op.74:

Thankfully, Op.74 came in the mail today, to complement the Auryn Op.71. Amd, what an interesting comparison it is.

First off, please forgive me for poo-pooing Opp. 71/74 for  being "weak". Hearing two different bands in these two-in-one sets, was enlightening. Either both groups sound very similar, or the music sounds unique no matter who plays it. In this case, I noticed that the "orchestral" double violin line throughout both sets causes the ear to hear similarities.

I am beginning to hear the "public" aspects of these sets. There seems to be only about 2 things happening at any given time, a simplfying aimed at seeking comprehension from newer and larger audeiences. My point is, my dislike of these sets has been illuminated, and my enjoyment of them has begun.



I liked the Endellion's Op.54, but I wondered if Op.74 would have the same boxy acoustics, but no, Op.74 sounds a bit more open than Op.54. What do you think?

The Endellion do play with some "wood", as opposed to the Auryn's porceliene(?) tone, and they emphasize the beat more, but overall, both groups have a bit more, a-hem "leisurely", gait than I'm used to, but, of course, both perfectly justify their tempos, which, in the Auryn I can't fault, and though I can't really fault the Endellion, I wouldn't have minded a little more in the fast bits (once again, no real criticism though: the Endellions combine tone and technique like no one else I've heard play Haydn).

The only compare I have is the ABQ Teldec Box in 74/3, the "Rider", though I can recollect the Amadeus from back in May. The Endellions take the opening a shade slower than the ABQ's, in my mind, perfect tempo, but the weight and point they give it adds to the intensity. I remember the Amadeus being very outgoing, and dramatic, perhaps preferring them slightly to the ABQ's more refined and machine like ensemble.

The Endellions are a full minute longer in the slow mvmt. (ABQ: 6:19/Endlln: 7:24), which, and I'm stretching here I suppose, seems to indicate a more Romantic approach than the ABQ's more Classical one? What do you think? They certainly emphasize the silences more than the ABQ.

The finale is 5:43/5:42, so, this is where things get interesting. I gotta give this to the Endellions, who imbue the opening with a bit more Romantic passion than the ABQ's more Classical Viennese lilt; though, one does hear more of the Viennese (am I spelling that right?) high society with the ABQ. The Endellions really get a nice dig on the chugga chugga rhythm, though the ABQ of course keep pace in their own fine way. I remember the Amadeus being perhaps the most red-blooded of all. As a matter of fact, I think their 71/74 is maybe the most consistently great set by them (haven't heard 54/55). I do hear that the Auryn's Op.74 might be The One.

I know I had the Kodaly Op.74 back in the day, but I can't remember the "Rider" at all. Though I can't imagine them better, their big sound must work well with the more public aspects of these sets. I wouldn't mind trying their Op.71 (anyone?).

Does anyone else feel that these two sets come closet to sounding like Dittersdorf's SQs?, perhaps in those less than obvious ways?

I'm also hearing earlier Haydn SQs throughout these two sets (finale of 74/2, opening of 74/1), as if Haydn went through his catalog reprising certain cool bits that he must have thought would work anew in their new public guise.

Does anyone else hear Op.50 in these sets?, perhaps in the tight thematicism?

Anyhow, I'm starting to notice the more orchestral writing going on here, which might also be why the simpler themes are more conducive. Yea, these sets seem to have stuff going on underneath the actual notes,...hmmm. Elusive. Masonic.

I know a lot of you love these Endellion performances. Waddaya say???

[Valentino]

One of the founders of musicology as a modern science, and the man who made Haydn the name today that it should have always been, but sadly wasn't. All Haydnites should be glad to have had him.  

indeed. Thank you, Gurn.

[Opus106]

One of the founders of musicology as a modern science, and the man who made Haydn the name today that it should have always been, but sadly wasn't. All Haydnites should be glad to have had him.    (obit courtesy of The Guardian)

We should be grateful to him, indeed. I can't help but note the he died in Haydn's Year.


P.S.: I was very certain that you would have known about this, but this post never turned up in a search for "landon."

[Marc]

One of the founders of musicology as a modern science, and the man who made Haydn the name today that it should have always been, but sadly wasn't. All Haydnites should be glad to have had him.    (obit courtesy of The Guardian)

• Howard Chandler Robbins Landon,
Musicologist, born 6 March 1926; died 20 November 2009

Read this today.
Sad news indeed.
R.I.P.