(++++) UNEXPECTED SOUNDS

Haydn: Baryton Trios, Hob. XI: Nos. 9, 55, 58, 61, 69 and 87. Valencia Baryton Project (Matthew Baker, baryton; Estevan de Almeida Reis, viola; Alex Friedhoff, cello). Naxos. $11.99.

Sullivan: Masquerade from “The Merchant of Venice”; Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII”; The Sapphire Necklace—Overture; Overture in C, In Memoriam. Emmanuel Lawler, tenor; RTÉ Concert Orchestra conducted by Andrew Penny. Naxos. $11.99.

     The versatility of Haydn, the sheer extent of his creativity, his ability to produce nearly endless amounts of excellent music in so many forms, continues to be a source of amazement – and a gateway to unusual listening experiences. There is a wealth of Haydn that most people have never heard, and it really is a wealth: amazingly rich in innovation, design, construction and (in more cases than not) musical substance. It seems truly astonishing to realize that Haydn created at such a high level while largely confined to what was more-or-less a backwater of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and while working as a paid producer of tunes for a noble family. But perhaps that is the wrong way to look at things. Haydn’s isolation from the great musical centers of Europe allowed him to think in ways uninfluenced by the norms of musical creation – he could, almost literally, “think outside the box,” because he was not boxed in by being surrounded by other composers competing for audiences and noble sponsorship. Furthermore, for many years the Esterházy family basically forced Haydn to think of new and intriguing approaches to music, demanding that he be creative in ways that would please their highly refined taste – an insistence that let Haydn stretch the bounds of the expected. And then there were the Esterházy pet projects, which pushed Haydn in ever-new directions – which brings us to the matter of the baryton. This is a large, unwieldy instrument of Baroque times, combining elements of the viola da gamba with ones from the lirone – the lowest member of the lira family. The baryton is the size of a cello but more awkward, requiring both bowing of its six or seven primary strings and plucking of a set of sympathetic metal wire strings with the left hand. Prince Nicolaus Esterházy loved the instrument and enjoyed playing it himself, so of course he asked Haydn to create music for it. And Haydn obliged in a fashion that can only be called Haydnesque: he did not produce a few pieces here and there, but created 126 trios for baryton, viola and cello, plus 50-or-so additional baryton works. And Haydn, with his ever-present developmental creativity, had the sympathetic strings tuned an octave higher than they had been in the past, with the result that the baryton – and its noble player – stood out more strongly in the trios than would otherwise have been the case. The trios themselves are scarcely major Haydn or major rediscoveries: the six offered on a new Naxos CD are all three-movement works lasting nine to 12-and-a-half minutes, three being in D, one each in A and G, and one (intriguingly but scarcely profoundly) in A minor. But the works are nevertheless remarkable in their own way. The seamless blending-with-contrast of the baryton with viola and cello, the creation of a baryton part suitable for a talented and enthusiastic amateur but not requiring substantial virtuosity, the poise and elegance characteristic of everything Haydn wrote – all these are very much in evidence on this fascinating Naxos CD. Haydn even goes out of his way to vary the forms of the trios, beginning two with Adagio movements and only one with the Allegro that might be expected (the other three start Moderato). Each trio contains a minuet, but they are differently placed: in second position four times and as finales twice. And while Haydn created some movements to be played at greater length – as long as seven-and-a-half minutes – he did not hesitate to produce others lasting less than two minutes. The members of the Valencia Baryton Project, thoroughly versed in Haydn’s style, play the trios with all the elegance and poise they deserve, allowing the baryton its intended first-among-equals position while also producing a balanced and nuanced sound that is quite different from what listeners will know from Haydn’s string trios for two violins and cello or, less often, violin, viola and cello. It is fascinating to realize that Haydn produced just 18 trios with those more-common instrumental combinations, and wrote seven times as many including the baryton. Of course, a large part of his motivation was to please his employer – doing so was Haydn’s job, after all – but there was surely something in the baryton itself, in its capabilities and oddities, that attracted Haydn to such an extent that he produced so great an abundance of music for the instrument. The chance to hear half-a-dozen examples of his exceptional handling of this obsolete and unusual instrument is an unalloyed pleasure.

     What is surprising and unexpected on a new Naxos CD featuring music by Sir Arthur Sullivan is not the instrumentation but the type of music. Sullivan’s name is inextricably linked to that of W.S. Gilbert and to the string of operettas the duo produced. To a much lesser extent, Sullivan is known for his hymns and his religiously inspired song, “The Lost Chord.” And his “Irish” symphony, his sole endeavor in that genre, is occasionally (very occasionally) heard. But very, very few people have heard his incidental music, his operas with librettists other than Gilbert, or most of his non-stage works. That makes this disc – actually a reissue containing performances from 1992, which alone is evidence of the rarity of this material being heard – very welcome indeed. The CD reinforces knowledge of Sullivan as a stage composer of considerable skill: his music for specific scenes within The Merchant of Venice and Henry VIII is very well-crafted, ties neatly and emphatically to the material it accompanies, and incorporates songs (one in each sequence) that tenor Emmanuel Lawler delivers with suitable feeling and a fine command of the musical material. It is worth remembering that Sullivan was a ballet composer of some note: the sole surviving music from Thespis, his first work with Gilbert, is a set of five short dance pieces; his ballet L’Ile Enchantée was acclaimed when presented at the end of a performance of Bellini’s La Sonnambula; and his full-length Victoria and Merrie England could stand, all on its own, as something of a summation of the musical tastes of the Victorian age. The Shakespeare-focused works on this disc date to the 1870s, when Sullivan and Gilbert mostly explored separate areas of interest but began to intersect: they worked on Thespis in 1871, then Trial by Jury in 1875. Even in the previous decade, though, Sullivan produced some music that certainly does not deserve obscurity. The overture to his very first attempt at opera, The Sapphire Necklace (1864), is an example: virtually all the music for this work has disappeared, and even the overture has survived only in a version for military band, but in the orchestral guise in which it is heard on this disc (Roderick Spencer did the orchestration), it is highly effective and contains more than a few hints of the substantial success that Sullivan would enjoy late in the following decade. Even more interesting is the 1866 Overture in C, In Memoriam, which certainly bears comparison with the 1870 Overture di Ballo. The earlier concert overture arose from a strong personal circumstance: the sudden death of Sullivan’s father. This traumatic event led Sullivan to produce a work of considerable sensitivity, very fine orchestration, and a greater degree of underlying emotion than was his wont in other music. It is never overdone and retains a certain gentility, in keeping with the mores of the age and Sullivan’s own personality. But it certainly serves – as does everything else on this very well-played disc – to show that there was a good deal more to Sullivan’s music than listeners would know from encountering him only in the Gilbert collaborations that made both librettist and composer so famous.