Doing Haydn Right

Over at San Francisco Classical Voice, Michelle Dulak Thomson praises the new attention Haydn's vast oeuvre is getting. I love the way she describes how interpreters are approaching this magnificent music, capturing its playfulness and wit:

"But it’s more than that — it’s the way players are increasingly approaching Haydn today, with a degree of intensity and alertness and specificity quite incompatible with 'letting the music take care of itself.' Often the first thing you’ll notice in such performances, interestingly, is that the players are making much of Haydn’s humor. They will point up the famous outright 'jokes' with glee, they’ll add insinuating or flippant or mock-tragic inflections at whim, they’ll seize on a prominent leap or an unexpected repetition or a quirky rhythm as an occasion for horseplay. I’ve heard sheer high spirits take over an ordinarily sober-minded ensemble to the extent that the players seemed determined to one-up each other in plain clowning around."

It's this kind of high spiritidness that informs Bernstein's famous readings of Haydn symphonies. I'm glad to know so many musicians are finding ways to communicate this quality.