Mozart Symphony No. 49 and Haydn Symphony No. 45 "The Farewell"

London Symphony Orchestra first French horn Barry Tuckwell basked in the recollection of having worked with several fine Hungarian maestros who led the LSO: Istvan Kertesz, Georg Solti, and Antal Dorati (1906-1988). Dorati, who would embark on the colossal project of recording all of the Haydn symphonies with Philharmonia Hungarica, always sensitive to the direct relationship Haydn enjoyed with the Austro-Hungarian tradition via the court of Nikolaus Esterhazy. Wolfgang Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550, in 1788.
Charles Rosen (in The Classical Style) has called the symphony "a work of passion, violence, and grief." Conductor Bruno Walter once advised that no conductor younger than 50 attempt the score, given its depth of expression. Every movement but the third is in sonata-form; the minuet and trio are in the usual ternary or song form. The first movement Molto Allegro, 2/2, begins darkly, not with its first theme but with accompaniment, played by the lower strings with divided violas. Dorati injects this movement with a nervous sense of tragic foreboding. The E-flat Major Andante in 6/8 seems to fulfill that tragic promise, moving with a dignified grace that the LSO strings and woodwinds realize with refined taste. The so-called Minuet (Allegretto) in ¾ hardly qualifies as "dance music," with its askew agogic accents and sudden interjections of painful dissonances. The G Major trio section does communicate galant sensibilities, with alternating choirs in strings and woodwinds, particularly the bassoon. The LSO brass make their appearance in elegant form. The Finale (Allegro assai, 2/2) Dorati urges forward with a solemn determinism, the eight-bar phrases and "Mannheim rockets" moving almost in perpetuum mobile energy. The LSO clarinet, bassoon, and accompanying winds intone with stinging acuity, as does the body of LSO strings. The dark, often polyphonic force of the symphony's last movement under Dorati remind us that Beethoven may well have taken its pages as a source for his own, "fateful" Fifth Symphony.
The Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp Minor, known as the "Farewell" Symphony (Abschieds-Symphonie), was composed by Joseph Haydn in 1772. It was written for Haydn's patron, Prince Esterhazy, while he, Haydn, and the court orchestra were at the Prince's summer palace in Eszterhaza. The stay there had been longer than expected, and most of the musicians had been forced to leave their wives back at home in Eisenstadt, so in the last movement of the symphony, Haydn subtly hinted to his patron that perhaps he might like to allow the musicians to return home: during the final Adagio each musician stops playing, snuffs out the candle on his music stand, and leaves in turn, so that at the end, there are just two muted violins left (played originally by Haydn himself and the concertmaster, Tomasini. Esterházy seems to have understood the message: the court returned to Eisenstadt the day following the performance.Dorati's reading, full of fire in the opening Allegro assai, projects a fierce sense of the empfindasamkeit, or "emotional" school of music instituted by C.P.E. Bach. The LSO string sound features biting attacks and incisive, clear intonation. The lovely, haunted Adagio in 3/8 highlights the LSO strings and woodwinds, a rather "baroque," liturgical sound as Dorati molds the phrases with tender affection. The Allegretto (Menuet) likes to alternate divided string choirs in ¾ time. We can hear Barry Tuckwell's resonant horn in the lovely trio section. The opening of the 2/2 Presto finale blazes with high spirits and bravura metric adjustment; the subsequent Adagio in 3/8 balances the structure of the previous second movement--allowing Tuckwell to appear once more--and bestows upon the work its eponymous, personal imprimatur, a reminder that time spares no one.

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