Haydn for all year round
George Hall enjoys Paul Mccreesh’s lavish recording of The Seasons
performance matches the high standards of Mccreesh’s previous grand choral projects. This 1801 oratorio is a wide-ranging celebration of rural life and the natural year, characteristically colourful and ingenious in its picturesque detail as well as in its overview of each individual season, and draws from Haydn assured and enlivening tonepainting that achieves a genuine panoramic glow. Mccreesh’s interpretation is delivered on the kind of scale Haydn himself is known to have presented the work in Vienna, with substantial choral and orchestral forces captured in sound that is both expansive and immediate.
Curiously, The Seasons has never quite achieved the popularity of its predecessor, despite the fact that Haydn’s inventive powers and vast expertise are demonstrably on a similarly high level.
Partly inspired by Handel’s oratorios, and designed to appeal to English audiences, The Seasons was conceived to be sung either in German or English. The work’s source was a long admired poem by the Scottish James Thomson, who published the four parts in 1730. A German translation was published in 1745, and it was this that Haydn’s friend, the distinguished diplomat, librarian and amateur musician Baron van Swieten used as a basis for his own libretto.
Haydn set the result in German, which Swieten then back-translated into English to fit the existing notes as best he could; the result has nevertheless attracted regular criticism for its awkwardness. Here Paul Mccreesh’s creative input has
Haydn’s The Seasons is a celebration of rural life and the natural year