Richard Bratby

Hadyn recreated

Plus: at the BBC Proms Barenboim’s rambling sermon overshadowed the more complex things he’d so eloquently helped Birtwistle and Elgar to say

‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ wrote Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of his Second Symphony. He should have listened to more Haydn. Sir Simon Rattle certainly has. Rattle becomes music director of the London Symphony Orchestra in September, and for the last concert before their union becomes official, he’d trawled through Haydn’s immense back-catalogue to assemble an unbroken 55-minute sequence of orchestral movements from Haydn’s symphonies, oratorios and half-forgotten operas. ‘This is an adventure,’ he declared, in that slightly goofy way that gets audiences instantly onside even while it infuriates those who, after four decades of achievement unsurpassed by any British conductor ever, still fail to understand what Rattle does and why he matters.

At this point I was planning to take a swipe at the Rattle-bashers — the tedious collection of cynics, snobs and the professionally underwhelmed who are already preparing to spatter cold, stale water on Rattle’s plans for London. But Haydn makes that impossible. He’s just too life-affirming. Anyone who’s discovered him knows that Haydn offers delights — emotional, intellectual, fantastical — of such freshness and generosity that his music should really be classified as a mood-altering substance. ‘No other composer, to my mind, has a greater capacity to dispel irritation or lift a mood of depression,’ wrote the psychiatrist Anthony Storr. ‘There is an objectivity about his music which shames self-absorption.’

Rattle’s ‘imaginary orchestral journey’ was an attempt, in equal parts reverent and gleeful, to make exactly that point. The aim, he said, was to showcase Haydn at his ‘most original, most bizarre, most witty’, and while some of these pieces were familiar — like the ‘Chaos’ prelude to The Creation, played with a rapt, vibrato-free intensity that could have been mistaken for a period-instrument ensemble — others, like the Adagio from Symphony No.

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