(++++) BENIGN NEGLECT

Haydn: Piano Sonatas (complete). Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano. Chandos. $104.99 (11 CDs).

     This could have been a genuinely foundational release, a crucial addition to the collection of anyone who already has one or several recordings of the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart. Instead, because it is so lazily assembled and produced, it gets a (++++) rating for the excellence of the music and sensitivity of the performances, but cannot be wholeheartedly recommended – someone else will have to produce a much more historically aware version of the Haydn sonata cycle, hopefully playing the earlier sonatas on harpsichord (for which they were written) and the later ones (which Haydn indicated were for either harpsichord or fortepiano) on an instrument of suitable provenance.

     What Chandos has done in this 11-disc release is simply to pack into a single box a decade’s worth of once-a-year Haydn recordings that Jean-Efflam Bavouzet started making because – as he explains at the beginning of the set’s 100-page booklet – he had been diagnosed in 1990 with functional dystonia (a somewhat less debilitating version of focal dystonia, the potentially career-ending malady that derailed Leon Fleisher for so many years), and therefore was physically unable to make the Bartók recording on which he was about to start. He turned to the greater simplicity of Haydn as a result, finding that he could perform Haydn sonatas without needing the contortions and extremes of technique required by Bartók.

     This makes Haydn sound like a second-class composer, which is the opposite of the case. However, Bavouzet is scarcely the only top-quality pianist who has generally neglected Haydn in favor of Mozart, Beethoven and others. And Bavouzet deserves credit for finding a way to make Haydn recordings essentially every year, with Chandos releasing them from 2010 to 2022. But because these were once-a-year events for Bavouzet, he chose to turn each of them into a kind of recital-of-contrasts: each disc deliberately includes later, more-mature and generally more-complex material as well as earlier and generally simpler music. This is understandable under the circumstances of the discs’ original release – but those circumstances change dramatically when the entirety of Haydn’s piano-sonata output is offered in a single box. Or at least things should change dramatically. The problem with this release is that they do not.

     Haydn’s sonata output is quite complex enough without listeners needing to wade through the way the works are presented here. In the now-usually-accepted numbering, there are 62 sonatas, but only 53 can be performed, because Nos. 17, 18, and 21-27 are lost. Several others are of doubtful authorship – a common problem with Haydn, who was so famous in his lifetime that works not by him were often attributed to him for purposes of cachet and better sales. Furthermore, Haydn’s sonatas sometimes appear in groups, sometimes not. They are sometimes clearly written for amateurs, sometimes not. They are sometimes essentially divertimenti (some are even labeled as such), sometimes considerably more serious. They are sometimes quite short, sometimes much more extended. In other words, the sonatas – like Haydn’s symphonies – are testimony to a brilliant musical mind, always in search of novelty and at the same time always aware of the audiences for which he wrote (Haydn, who had something of a head for business as well as music, actually withheld some of these sonatas from publication because he thought they would reach out to too small a set of performers to be financially viable).

     What we have in this release is neither more nor less than a reissue of the 11 CDs originally made by Bavouzet during more than a decade – each of them confusingly mixing works from different time periods, with different difficulty levels, without any regard whatsoever for chronology or any other form of connective tissue. The aforementioned very extended booklet, far from helping guide listeners through the cycle, simply reproduces, word for word, all the notes from the original releases – which means, for example, that the introductory overview of Haydn’s sonatas appears again and again, and again and yet again; so do the same introductory paragraphs to the grouped sonatas whenever one of those works is on a particular CD. The notes on the music, by Marc Vignal, often do not discuss the sonatas in the same order in which they appear on the discs, thus confusing matters further. And the written material makes no attempt to fit the smattering of non-sonata pieces offered here – a piano version of the variations from the “Emperor” string quartet, a Fantasia, an Adagio, a Capriccio, and others – into the sonata sequence, or to explain why these ancillary pieces are offered in the places in which they appear.

     The extreme confusion of the presentation makes it virtually impossible for listeners to hear the sonatas chronologically or in the groups into which Haydn often gathered them. The sonatas are, in essence, simply splattered across the 11 discs, with no rhyme or reason. A major cycle such as this should have, by implication, some organizing principle. This one does not.

     And yet it is still, within the limitations of presentation and those related to Bavouzet’s use of wholly inappropriate instruments – nine-foot Yamaha concert grand pianos – a wonderful (if confused) musical experience, because Haydn’s piano sonatas do remain far less familiar than those of Mozart and Beethoven and yet are entirely worthy of receiving equal (or at least near-equal) attention. Bavouzet is at his very best in some of the darker sonatas (No. 33 in C minor, No. 49 in C-sharp minor, No. 53 in E minor, and others), but he also brings considerable jauntiness and delicacy (at least within the sonority of a modern grand piano) to some of the light two-movement works (No. 9 in D, No. 20 in B-flat, No. 40 in E-flat, etc.). One sequence (on the fifth disc) gives a tantalizing hint of what could have happened if this release had been much more carefully planned and executed: three brief sonatas written at the same time, for the same dedicatee – Nos. 54 in G, 55 in B-flat, and 56 in D – are played one after the other; and sure enough, hearing the similarities and differences among these pieces results in a whole new level of insight into how Haydn thought about and used the piano and how he fulfilled commissions or simply created gifts for noble patrons. That sort of discovery is very much available through consideration of the entirety of Haydn’s piano-sonata music – but unfortunately is not on offer here. Played by Bavouzet with skill and structural understanding, if not really in accord with historic performance practices, these recordings of the sonatas reach out again and again to make the case for Haydn as a vastly underrated composer in this form. There is nothing else quite like this collection currently available, and for that reason alone it can be highly recommended. In many ways the release is wonderful, but Chandos could have made it great, and chose not to.