Carolyn Sampson takes the soprano part, which was never going to be likely to put me off buying it.
If, as the explanatory notes say, The Seasons has suffered in comparison with The Creation in the same way that Haydn has suffered for not having been Mozart, it's not as if either of them suffered that much. The Seasons, not unlike Vivaldi's version of events, is a cycle of nature but in Haydn there is the sub-text of progress and renewal in which nature is also God. None of that is likely to deflect our jocular maestro from quoting himself, the Surprise symphony in the Spring, and Mozart later.
Mozart never let a profound subject prevent him from exuberant invention and, if anything, Haydn is even less likely to.
While one of the most memorable passages comes in the onset of bleak midwinter, the merry-making after the harvest is a time for full-blooded roistering and Carolyn sings,
You
mincing dandies, stay away!
Here
your airs and graces count for nothing,
and
smooth talk does no good:
no-one
will listen to you.
One knows not to come to Haydn for too much introspection and long, dark nights of the soul. Even if he wanted to do that, and he doesn't look as if he did, it wasn't what he was mostly employed to do. The string quartet setting of the Seven Last Words from the Cross, so beloved here in the release by Cuarteto Casals, doesn't take us through the agonies and ecstacies that James MacMillan does but it makes for a gorgeous piece of music. But The Seasons is something of a mature schwanengesang and blends tender moments, duets and choruses into a beguiling, shifting experience that, of course, ends in celebratory fashion with us asking that we,
shall ascend into the glorious heav'nly realm.
For the purposes of the suspension of disbelief, it is best not to ask if that isn't right here, right now with a continuing supply of wonderful music or if there is somewhere better.
