Concertos - Intégrale

Description

At first glance (and I have a big nose, I assure you), a box set of such thickness must surely hold a lot. Hmm. Let’s say twenty CDs? Let’s open it. Surprise: only six CDs are lounging there in royal comfort, accompanied by a booklet as thick as all six of them, three hundred pages. A 300-page booklet for just a handful of Haydn concertos? Ha, but no, dear readers: the booklet covers the complete symphonies, quartets, sonatas and concertos of Haydn, not just the concertos, which take up only 10% of the booklet. But with that slightly mocking little preamble now closed, let us listen to Haydn’s concertos, of which there seem to be a good two dozen: two very famous ones (trumpet, cello), another fairly well known one (the D major piano concerto), two or three others whose existence the average listener vaguely knows about, and the rest. Phew. Indeed, concerto is not the field in which one expects Haydn, who was never himself a great soloist (like Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini or even Händel, for example) and therefore did not have fun pushing the limits of anything — something he did, for example, brilliantly in the field of the string quartet or the symphony. That does not prevent his melodic genius and his sense of wit and surprise from giving birth to astonishing little gems. If most of them date from the 1750s to the 1770s, the first maturity period, the most famous ones (and quite rightly so) were written between 1780 and 1796, so this is Haydn at his greatest. One is astonished by the extravagant virtuosity of the Cello Concerto, doubtless the most famous example of the 18th century, and even more by that of the Trumpet Concerto — it must be said that in that year 1796, the keyed trumpet had just been invented, the chromatic trumpet, in other words: Haydn does not hold back from going even further. A lovely box set, filled with astonishing surprises, but surprise is a bit of Haydn’s signature, isn’t it?