PAUL MCCREESH

REBECCA FRANKS talks to the British conductor about why Haydn’s Seasons is finally having its moment in the sun

Why has The Seasons been less popular than The Creation?

The Seasons is absolutely brilliant, but I feel in some senses Mozart and Beethoven are more indestructible. It’s much easier to give a bad performance of Haydn. Everybody knows the story of The Creation so there’s an easy point of access, whereas The Seasons has a much more diffuse story and no natural storyline. Also it has never had a decent English translation to lift it off the page. There’s nothing wrong with listening to it in German, but there’s something more immediate about a language with which you are totally familar. That’s why I have recorded it in English.

Just how bad is the original English text of The Seasons?

I would give it one out of ten. It’s basically a dog’s dinner of English: it’s obtuse, inaccurate, clumsy, stiff and at one or two moments unintentionally extremely funny. The Creation has also long been full of howlers, but you can’t really make any case for doing The Seasons in the original English. I love Thomson’s The Seasons – it’s life-affirming poetry. I wanted to make a really lively translation that worked with Haydn’s music. I have no pretensions to be a poet. It was about doing a practical job. But I do love words, and this was a labour of love.

What do we know about the performances in Haydn’s lifetime? Haydn did large and small performances of The Seasons and The Creation, but the Viennese society that commissioned these pieces had the most enormous forces. The Seasons included ten horns, presumably for the hunting chorus, which as you can hear from the CD is a thrilling sound. It brings the world of outdoor music into the concert hall. It’s interesting that there were no markings on the parts about when large or small forces should play, but I think there’s a natural assumption about when to reduce for a soloistic effect. The contrast brings the score to life.