Celebrating Haydn
Written by Michael Dungan Tuesday, 18 August 2009 00:00
18.8.09 McMahon, IBO/Huggett National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Haydn – Symphony No 44 (Trauer); Cello Concerto in C. Mozart – Symphony No 40.
There’s that cliche about thinking you know something and then encountering it again in a new light. And being surprised and maybe excited or moved.
So it was at the Irish Baroque Orchestra’s afternoon concert in the National Gallery. Haydn’s Trauer (mourning) symphony is so familiar, the best-known of his “storm and stress” works from the 1770s. Typically, it melds classical proportions and language with an emotional openness that foreshadows Beethoven and the romantic era beyond him.
But it looks not only forward. That emotional quality echoes the “moving of the affections” essential to the music of the baroque period several decades earlier.
Bringing together these apparently disparate factors and capitalising consistently on their artistic potential, was IBO director Monica Huggett. Violinist and baroque period specialist, she emphasised, even exploited – often to thrilling and revelatory effect – whatever was baroque in what remains a product of the classical period.
Directing from the leader’s desk, she reinforced dynamic contrasts, insisted on a crisp rhythmic vitality, and sustained an edgy emotional charge throughout.
She continued in the same vein in Mozart’s much loved penultimate symphony, No 40 in G minor.
There was more of the same exquisite baroque oboe and valveless horn, now with wooden flute as well, real voices rather than mere colours, all over a vigorous foundation of period strings – light but intense, searing unanimity, an almost palpable collective zest.
Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C provided respite from the emotional force of the two symphonies. The IBO’s principal cellist, Sarah McMahon, captured its sunny personality and tackled its virtuosic demands with disarming poise.
MICHAEL DUNGAN
