Word: haydn
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...most concertgoers a generation ago, Joseph Haydn was the composer of only twelve symphonies (inexplicably numbered 93-104), a few string quartets and the Austrian national anthem. According to the music-appreciation crowd, he was a genial papa figure who enjoyed a joke at the audience's expense and turned out a great deal of tinkly, tinseled music to light up the ballrooms of the Austrian nobility...
Nowadays, Papa is lighting up a good many more places. In what must be considered a permanent renewal of interest in 18th century music, Haydn is being hailed as one of history's leading musical revolutionaries. Listeners are discovering, most of them for the first time, the vibrant iconoclasm of a composer who began life by assimilating the even-patterned regularity of the style of his times and spent the rest of his career thumbing his nose...
...Weber. For most of his life he was court composer to Prince Nicholas Esterházy, who obliged him to wear livery and dine at the servants' table, but who gave him every encouragement to tinker with accepted musical conventions and, when necessary, to kick them over. Haydn's musical life, in fact, stands as a direct contradiction to the old movie script that requires genius to feed on adversity...
...spite of all this, the evening was far from an overwhelming triumph. The Haydn and the Milhaud suffered from problems of balance; the brass and the percussion were the respective offenders. Intonation in the Haydn was poor. Accompaniment figures in the violas were almost polytonal, and in spite of stalwarts like Street, Lisa Sandow and Richard Hamm, the strings evinced the same raw amateur sound that has plagued the Bach Society for years. Only in the humor of the finale's coda did the work manage to come alive...
...could not help but noitice an element of vulgarity in Adams's treatment of the music. Both the Haydn and the Mozart lacked the classical elegance that is so important in works of that period. In the Milhaud Adams adopted a grinding, spread-kneed approach and a style of rhythmic emphasis that owed more to Motown than nineteen-twenties jazz...