12 LONDON SYMPHONIES

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN / ARR. J. P. SALOMON

• LA TEMPESTAD | SILVIA MÁRQUEZ CHULILLA, fortepiano and direction

• 4 CDs MÚSICA ANTIGUA ARANJUEZ 010 2012 | DL M-1532-2012

The shrewd, calculating English impresario John Peter Salomon signed two contracts with Joseph Haydn, in 1795 and 1796, by which he obtained the rights to the twelve symphonies the composer had written for his London concert series.

Free thus to exploit his “property”, Salomon decided in 1799 to write and publish these arrangements, with which he popularised the orchestral music of the most esteemed composer of the day: the so-called “Sinfonías de Londres” had been conceived to be performed before an audience very different from the usual one of courts and palaces. Masterpieces that still sound as fresh and glowing today as on the day of their premiere.

This release comprises 4 CDs with the world premiere recording of the complete 12 symphonies in J. P. Salomon's chamber arrangement.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

12 London Symphonies

Arranged for flute, two violins, viola, violoncello and fortepiano ad libitum by Johann Peter Salomon (1745-1815)

CD 1

Sinfonía n.º 96 en Re mayor, “El milagro”

1. Adagio – Allegro

2. Andante

3. Minuetto: Allegretto – Trio

4. Finale: Vivace

Sinfonía n.º 95 en Do menor

5. Allegro Moderato

6. Andante

7. Minuetto: Moderato - Trio

8. Allegro Vivace

Sinfonía n.º 93 en Re mayor

09. Adagio - Allegro assai

10. Largo Cantabile

11. Minuetto: Allegro - Trio

12. Presto ma non troppo

CD 2

Sinfonía n.º 98 en Si bemol mayor

01. Adagio - Allegro

02. Adagio Cantabile

03. Minuetto: Allegro – Trio

04. Finale: Presto

Sinfonía n.º 94 en Sol mayor, “La sorpresa”

05. Adagio - Vivace assai

06. Andante

07. Minuetto: Allegro molto – Trio

08. Allegro di molto

Sinfonía n.º 97 en Do mayor

09. Adagio - Vivace

10. Adagio ma non troppo

11. Minuetto: Allegretto - Trio

12. Spiritoso

CD 3

Sinfonía n.º 99 en Mi bemol major

01. Adagio - Vivace assai

02. Adagio

03. Menuetto: Allegretto - Alternativo

04. Finale: Vivace

Sinfonía n.º 101 en Re mayor, "El reloj"

05. Adagio - Presto

06. Andante

07. Menuetto: Allegretto - Alternativo

08. Finale: Vivace

Sinfonía n.º 100 en Sol mayor, "Militar"

09. Adagio - Allegro

10. Allegretto

11. Menuetto: Allegretto Moderato - Alternativo

12. Finale: Presto

CD 4

Sinfonía n.º 102 en Si bemol mayor

01. Adagio - Allegro Vivace

02. Adagio

03. Minuetto: Allegretto - Minuetto 2do.

04. Presto

Sinfonía n.º 103 en Mi bemol mayor, "El redoble de tambor"

05. Adagio - Allegro con Spirito

06. Andante

07. Menuetto - Menuetto 2do.

08. Finale: Allegro con Spirito

Sinfonía n.º 104 en Re mayor, "Londres"

09. Adagio - Allegro

10. Andante

11. Menuetto: Allegro - Menuetto Alternativo

12. Allegro Spirituoso

World Premiere Recording

“The result is dazzling. Despite the small forces, Salomon's mastery and the very high calibre of the performers mean that the listener does not miss the richness of the orchestra; on the contrary, Haydn's musical discourse shines with crystalline clarity and even reveals unsuspected nuances.”

Antonio Díaz Bautista | LA VERDAD

“Their performances are splendid, stylish and graceful, elegant and distinguished, of diamond-like clarity and extraordinary variety of nuance, reconciling the impeccable geometry of form with the vitality, the sense of humour and the pinches of pre-Romantic expressiveness found in these inspired and brilliant works. A luminous album.”

Pablo J. Vayón | DIARIO DE SEVILLA

“The instrumentalists of La Tempestad have succeeded in conveying both the graceful fluency of Haydn's music and the pre-Romantic tension that surfaces in many passages. I recommend this album to anyone who wishes to enjoy almost five hours of uninterrupted beauty.”

Antonio Díaz Bautista | LA VERDAD

“In the symphonic narrative of the instrumental ensemble directed by Silvia Márquez one senses a dense poetry in which a serenity spread over refined phrasing prevails. The sonic fabric woven by the solo instruments of La Tempestad is very well balanced; the musical tale speaks for itself, regardless of the instrument that gives it life.”

Carme Miró | SONOGRAMA MAGAZINE

“The version of the great Austrian master's symphonies offered by these seven instrumentalists, whose way of playing stands out for its expressive power, takes the breath of creativity to its ultimate consequences.”

Carme Miró | SONOGRAMA MAGAZINE

Haydn's London Symphonies for Salomon

But what can we say about Haydn and his sublime and ravishing symphonies? Such a marvel cannot be described in words: to understand it, one must have heard them…

Morning Chronicle (London, February 1795)

Johann Peter Salomon, a phenomenal violinist, excellent conductor and shrewd German impresario living in London, surely could not have imagined the immeasurable service he was doing to the history of music when, in 1790, he proposed that Franz Joseph Haydn travel to London to conduct, play and compose the great legacy of works that were written and performed in the public concert series that Salomon managed with enormous success in the English capital. Haydn made two journeys to the English capital, the first between 1791 and 1792, and the second between 1794 and 1795, a period that, in Haydn's own words, proved in the end to be the happiest of his life.

The story

Having learned of the death of Prince Nikolaus I Esterházy, Haydn's patron, Salomon, with an infallible commercial instinct, did not hesitate to travel to Vienna to engage not only our composer but also, while he was at it, Mozart, both at that time (“were” is superfluous) possibly the most important, admired and imitated figures in the musical world, in order to give his series an even greater lustre.

Mozart showed no interest, or perhaps other commitments tied him to Vienna; Haydn, however, full of enthusiasm and in a way rejuvenated by the interesting challenge, accepted with his eyes closed to go to a new country unknown to him, embarking at the age of 58 on the great adventure of his life after decades in the stable service of the Esterházys.

On 15 December 1790 Salomon and Haydn set out for London, not without Mozart's reluctance: “my dear papa, you are not made for rushing about the world and, besides, you don't speak the language”. Haydn's reply is historic: “my language is understood all over the world”. In tears, the farewell between Haydn and Mozart was particularly bitter and, for the Salzburg composer, who would die a year later, premonitory: “we shall never see each other again”.

Swiftly, by the standards of the time, Haydn arrived on 2 January 1791 in a London that offered him, at first sight, the spectacle of a musical life dense to the point of oppression, brimming with sacred and secular concerts, academies and soirées in the countless places where music was made and heard: a thousand churches, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Concerts of Ancient Music, the Professional Concerts, the Madrigal Society or The Glee-Club. Haydn was awaited with the greatest expectation and, alongside a frenetic social life of visits and attendance at events, our musician worked, together with two symphonies, nos. 96 and 95, his first in the London series, on a new opera that would keep him busy until the summer, L’anima del filosofo.

On 11 March his public debut finally took place at the Hanover-Square concerts, within a motley programme in which, alongside works by Rosetti, Dussek and Andreozzi, a “New Grand Overture” by Haydn was heard (his Sinfonía nº 96, “El Milagro”), with Haydn at the harpsichord and sharing the direction of the concert with Salomon himself, “leader of the Band” from the concertmaster's desk.

The success was total and absolute, and the London Diary was enthusiastic about the long-awaited event in which Haydn was at last heard as conductor and composer. His triumph was immediate: Haydn, who in May of that year had been moved to tears hearing the Mesías in Westminster Abbey, was received by the Prince of Wales, by the Dukes of Cork and by a large part of the “à la page” aristocracy, and in July of the same year he received an Honoris causa doctorate in music from the University of Oxford in an imposing ceremony. Haydn was happy and it took no effort to persuade him that, once the season was over, he should stay another in London until June 1792, the year in which he returned to Vienna.

Still in England, among the many other works of his heard in London, always under the composer's direction, he composed the Sinfonía nº 95, premiered on an unspecified date in 1791; no. 93, premiered on 17 February 1792; no. 98, on 2 March of the same year; no. 94 (“La sorpresa”), on 23 March; and no. 97, premiered at the beginning of May, thus completing the first group of the twelve great London symphonies. The success of each and every concert was always rapturous, the reviews unanimously glowing, and movements often had to be encored, such as the first and last of no. 98; in this symphony Haydn himself had reserved a small keyboard solo for himself, marvellously played by him, according to the memoirs and diaries of many of those present at that concert.

If on his return from London to Vienna and Eisenstadt (Hungary) Haydn was as busy as ever with the return to the Austrian routine, he did not forget England. There he had been happy, had had one or two romantic affaires, even a thwarted surgical operation, and he returned with his genius recognised by all; his ego and self-esteem were at their highest, and his creative enthusiasm drove him to go on working for Salomon: the Cuartetos, op. 71 and 74 of 1793, while he began to sketch new symphonies, always with Salomon and his magnificent orchestra in mind.

In January 1794 he returned to London for a concert planned for 3 February (although he arrived a day late), taking with him this time a useful and efficient Johann Elssler as servant and copyist. On this second journey he completed the series of his London symphonies, from no. 99 to no. 104, but he also wrote sonatas and trios, possibly his most mature, cantatas as sublime as the Scena di Berenice, and the Sinfonía concertante para oboe, fagot, violín, violonchelo y orquesta.

In London, within the circle of Salomon, a phenomenal violinist even though his mind was always on his business affairs, the latter premiered the quartets that Haydn had written for him in Vienna; quartets with the peculiarity of having been conceived, perhaps for the first time in the history of music, not to be heard in the intimate circle of the chamber, of aristocratic or enlightened chamber-music salons, but in the far larger space of a concert hall for a very numerous audience: Haydn was in fashion and the reviews continued to be enthusiastic for all his appearances and premieres.

From 1795 Salomon's concerts left the Hanover-Square rooms and moved to the Royal Theater. Salomon's orchestra, which now had the great Italian violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti as concertmaster, reached its highest level of quality, and it is no wonder that in these conditions, with possibly the best-equipped orchestra in all Europe at his disposal, Haydn's genius soared to its highest peaks and created a revolutionary music that, in some way, was ahead of its time and projected the symphony decisively into the future.

Passionate about Haydn's music, the new Prince Esterházy, Nikolaus II, had our musician in mind to rebuild his orchestra and choir in order to give a fresh impetus to the music of his entourage. Nikolaus invited Haydn to return to Vienna to become his “Kapellmeister” with all the prerogatives, advantages and benefits, and Haydn, heartbroken, rich, famous and adored by the English, but with enormously flattering prospects, took his leave of his “dear English friends” for ever and returned to Vienna, not to compose another symphony in the fourteen years of life that remained to him, but to write works as marvellous as the great masses (In tempore belli, Nelson, Theresien, Harmonien), La Creación or Las Estaciones. In England he had left an indelible memory but also some of his finest works and, possibly, some of the most beautiful symphonies ever written, forerunners of the new language of the century to come.

The collection

Haydn's London symphonies represent the culminating point of a symphonic output that goes back almost forty years, to around 1759, when he wrote his first symphony, still deeply influenced by the Viennese instrumental tradition. Throughout the following years Haydn developed a language of his own in which the external influences to which he was happily receptive, together with his own idiosyncrasy, wove a creative fabric of overwhelming strength and personality that could not but culminate in one of the most frequently performed cycles of the classical repertoire.

Of exceptional fecundity (it is also true that Haydn's surprisingly lucid longevity is no less extraordinary for his time), Haydn's symphonic output piles up masterpiece upon masterpiece from the very first moment, as in the case of the very early Le matin, Le midi and Le soir of 1761, numbers 6, 7 and 8 respectively of his symphonic output and the fruit of his collaboration with the magnificent and recently renewed orchestra of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, in whose service Haydn had just entered as vice-“Kapellmeister” in May of that year. Symphonies such as El filósofo (no. 22), Hornsignal (31), Fúnebre (44), Los adioses (45), El distraído (60), La caza (73), La reina (85) or the symphonies for Count d’Ogny (82, 86, 88 and 89), to cite only some with titles, invite us on an incomparable stroll from the purest quasi baroque tradition of the Italian overture to the modern Parisian vision of the orchestral world, by way of the most refined Sturm und Drang imaginable in the pieces composed from 1765 onwards.

The symphonies for Salomon represent not only the quintessence of Haydn at a moment when his quality was being refined in an extraordinary way, but also consecrate, perhaps for the first time in the history of music, the figure of a universal artist whose music knows no frontiers: Spain and Russia, the Balkans, Turkey or Scandinavia, the colonies of New England, of New Spain, or the ships that plough every sea in the world: wherever there are musicians there is a score by Haydn, a mass phenomenon whose compositions, repeated again and again, are common currency in academies and concerts. Unlike other equally prolific authors, not as inferior to Haydn as is systematically assumed (we think of the pseudo-Spanish Carl von Ordóñez, for example), Haydn's music, however often it was heard or played, never seemed “demodée” to his contemporaries, who found in it a universal language, clear, evident and simple, the one that Haydn himself claimed as universal, in which the greatest elegance never masks the sincerity and wholesome simplicity of a kind man happy to be alive, despite the many sorrows and troubles that life brought him.

Symphonies such as the Redoble de timbal or La sorpresa (no. 94), El milagro (96), Militar (100) or El reloj (101), names all given by their contemporaries and not by the composer, immediately became something so familiar in the lives of music lovers that from then until today they have never ceased to be a constant presence in every concert hall, without their obsessive repetition over seasons and generations managing to wear down or degrade pages that have withstood, like few others (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven), the devastating passage of time, fashions, tastes and trends.

Tenacious in his projects, Salomon, a restless businessman, did not want Haydn to leave England just like that without some additional honest profit for both, and in August 1795, shortly before Haydn's final departure for Vienna, the two signed a contract by which the composer ceded to the violinist and impresario the rights to his first six London symphonies. Later, in February 1796, Haydn signed over the last six, whereupon Salomon became from that moment the true owner of the twelve symphonies that had become the most heard and most desired compositions in Europe. However, the violinist did not opt for the immediate publication of the London collection in its original orchestral form; instead, with a clear commercial vision and sensing a far easier and cheaper dissemination and a safe and vast sale, he made a first adaptation of the symphonies for a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or fortepiano) accompanied by a violin and a violoncello “ad libitum” in three batches: the first in June 1796 (the first four symphonies), another in July of the same year (the fifth and sixth) and a third, somewhat later, in October 1797 with the rest of the symphonies. This was clearly “music for the poor”, that is, transcriptions and arrangements that allowed anyone who wished, rich or poor, in a large house or a small one, to have at home these symphonies, which very few had the means to hear in their original version.

Arrangements of this kind were no rarity in the closing years of the eighteenth century: a forerunner of what the album (CD) represents today and of the possibility of listening to music whenever and wherever we wish, the transfer of great and famous works to more manageable formats in order to bring them to the dining room or music room of the bourgeoisie and the enlightened middle class was an everyday occurrence: symphonies reduced for piano four hands, orchestral reductions for piano to accompany soloists (concertos for violin, flute, piano, vocal arias), entire operas arranged for more modest ensembles, sometimes even without the voices, like the marvellous anonymous arrangements of Mozart operas for two violins or flutes, for string trios and quartets, or in the most unimaginable and ingenious combinations.

Insufficient in its texture, Salomon's first arrangement of the London symphonies was nonetheless a truly poor “music for the poor”, given the quantity of details, colours, “sfumature” and nuances that had inevitably to be omitted from the original, in a version so reduced and limited to a keyboard to which a violin and a violoncello were added as filler. In 1798 the appearance of a new arrangement of our symphonies was announced, again from Salomon's skilful hand, this time for quintet (flute, two violins, viola and violoncello) with the addition of a fortepiano “ad libitum” to which, though not indicated but required by tradition, a double bass could (and should) be added alongside the violoncello, whereby the richness of detail, colour, nuance and relief in the internal structure of the works improved radically and, with reduced forces, very high degrees of sonic fidelity to the original were achieved without losing the accessibility of means afforded by an ensemble reduced to seven soloists.

The recording

The present recording was made from a copy of a Salomon edition of around 1800 which, by great good fortune, bears markings added “a posteriori” by the musicians who performed the works in those years, shedding special light for today's reader on how they may really have been played by musicians who stood very close in time, and perhaps even personally, to the composer and his spirit. There is no doubt that Salomon's second arrangement brings the material infinitely closer to the original sound: the almost transparent and sober texture of a trio in which the fortepiano takes care of everything and receives only the faint brushstrokes of colour from an optional violin and violoncello is replaced by the far more forceful and rich colouring of a string quartet to which the particular timbre of the flute and the harmonic richness of the piano, with the logical contribution of a double bass that the group La Tempestad intelligently adds, give an orchestral substance and texture to an ensemble that, without being obviously the full version with its perfect play of light and dynamic balance, does not come across as “small” but as resoundingly intimate, without losing the essence of masterpieces that still sound as fresh and glowing today as on the day of their premiere.

Emilio Moreno