1 Finale: May 10th 2001

“Are we finished now?”

Adam Fischer knew the answer, of course, but in asking the question at a quarter to eight on Thursday May 10th 2001 he set the seal on fifteen years of recording history: a cue for congratulation and relief.

The end came in two parts. On Tuesday May 8th there was a session for re-takes of three or four movements which for various reasons had not gone well originally. It is almost inevitable in a stretch of ten days, with twelve symphonies to record comprising forty-six movements, that a few could be bettered. Last on my list of re-takes was the opening movement of Symphony 39. At the first attempt this had been plagued by high winds buffeting the Haydnsaal, intruding in the many dramatic silences which punctuate the movement: Sturm und Drang for all the wrong reasons. But on another day, free of frustration and with the end nearly in sight, the searing intensity of Adam Fischer’s conducting could be caught at white heat: a dramatic G-minor full stop to complete the cycle. That evening the longest table ever seen at the Eder restaurant in Eisenstadt was assembled to host a dinner for the entire orchestra, its conductor and manager, and the ‘two gentlemen from Nimbus’ as my colleague John Gladwyn and I were so politely known.

But two days later it must have seemed like business as usual in the Haydnsaal: the orchestra warming-up, microphones in place and a producer prowling the corridors of the neighbouring Wildschweinssaal to ensure that all connecting doors were shut. The reason for reconvening was simple. Over the years there had been much discussion about which symphonies should be re-recorded, a discussion which invariably invoked the analogy of painting the Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland. In the end a practical if not over-generous solution was found: re-record one symphony which, interpretatively, had evolved to such a degree since its first recording that it would document how the cycle had evolved and thus provide a sort of musical ‘before’ and ‘after’. It must be remembered that the rival Dorati Decca cycle had been recorded in under a quarter of the time taken by the Nimbus series and is perhaps more consistent musically and technically as a result.

To my delight Adam unhesitatingly nominated No 88, a personal favourite and a symphony for which I had attended the original sessions over a decade before in September 1990. That was a fine recording and was warmly received by Peter Heyworth, among others, in one of his last reviews for the Observer. The orchestra for those sessions featured a starry cast of Vienna Philharmonic principals: Rainer Küchl as Konzertmeister, Wilhelm Hübner leading the second violins, Fritz Dolezal leading the cellos, oboist Gerhard Turetschek, flautist Meinhart Niedermeyer and the horn player Günter Högner. The presence of these players guaranteed a particular sound and style but one which perhaps had more to do with the traditions of the Wiener Philharmoniker than the conductor’s convictions. Heard today I suspect that Adam Fischer would say that the recording did not have quite the right ‘accent’. Anybody who heard him conduct the symphony at the opening concert of the Festival of Central European Culture at the Barbican in June 1998 would know exactly what this meant. Hilary Finch in The Times put it perfectly:

Their dialect is as Central European as it comes. To listen to their phrasing and articulation is the musical equivalent of hearing the heady lilt of rural Austrian compared with the standard German of so much mainstream music-making. Adam Fischer takes such care in balancing his instrumental ensemble that cross-currents of melody and twitches of accent are frequently uncovered as if for the first time. And elusive strains of distant folk music from a border region rich in emigrant and immigrant cultures become newly apparent in the bows of those for whom this music is bred in the bone.

The new recording of Symphony 88 made in May 2001 documents this vernacular but it was very nearly undone by that other Burgenland speciality: wine. Schloß Esterházy in Eisenstadt is both the home of Haydn and it has its own vineyard. The two make tasteful bedfellows in a red and white wine which bear the label Die Schöpfung. Over the years an uneasy peace had existed between the demands of the wine bottling plant – situated directly beneath the Haydnsaal – and the Schloß Management who rented the hall to Nimbus. It was one problem – along with intruding tourist parties, minor earthquakes and the occasional Beatles night at the Schloß Café – which we had all but forgotten about in the recent past. But, just as the first take of 88’s Finale spun to a close, an all too-familiar sound was heard: glass bottles, thousands of them, circulating on the machinery below the hall. We had to laugh. Fifteen years in the making and here on the very last day our efforts were rewarded by the sound of several thousand litres of Welschriesling being bottled beneath us. Haydn would have appreciated the joke and we had often been tempted to add new nick-names to symphonies whose recording had been rudely interrupted: 88 is too popular, but the public may have been none the wiser if Symphony No 4, for example, had been subtitled The Blaufrankisch. All’s well that ends well and the recording of 88 was happily completed after an impromptu early supper and the echt-Viennese diplomacy of the orchestra’s Vorstand and second horn Bobby Lorenzi.

2 First Movement - Introduction: 1986

Eisenstadt, today’s tourist literature tells us, is Haydnstadt. Back in the mid-1980s, however, there was little beyond a street name and one or two restaurants named after the composer who had been the Esterházy’s resident Kapellmeister from 1761 until the death of Nikolaus Esterházy in 1790. Farming and quarrying were bigger business then than the annual Festival which today attracts Haydn-lovers from all over the globe to visit this capital of the Austrian province of Burgenland, tucked away near the Hungarian border on the edge of the Danube Plain.

The history and geography of the region is as rich politically as it is musically. From the 8th Century onwards it had been populated by German, Slavic and Magyar colonists and even today there are neighbouring pockets of land on the Hungarian side where there are differences in language between people within a few hundred metres of each other. A trip from the Esterházy Palace at Fertöd – the ‘Hungarian Versailles’ – to the Palace at Eisensatdt is a remarkable history lesson, preferably taken via Sopron. The Austro-Hungarian border makes a detour here to embrace Sopron into Hungary and in so doing divides the Neusiedler Lake between the two countries: two-thirds to Austria and the balance to Hungary. Perhaps Sopron would have become Burgenland’s capital – it is as architecturally imposing as Eisenstadt is provincial – but in a sequence of bizarre elections following the dismemberment of the old empire after 1918 the town voted to remain in Hungary. The border was thus rather awkwardly drawn to accommodate it and those Hungarians who had been specially bussed in to vote in the election could return to whichever region they had been ‘borrowed’ from. Many decades later the sight of Hungarians being bussed to and from the town would most probably have meant that Nimbus’ recording sessions were in progress just over the border. Sopron was the base of the Hungarian section of the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra.

Sopron plays another part in the story of how the orchestra came to be created and how the recording of the symphonies evolved. In 1898 the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven Club of Sopron began a tradition of annually performing the string quartet version of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt on Good Friday. Although the composer is in fact buried under the North Tower of the Palace, the Bergkirche possesses Haydn’s official mausoleum. The tradition was begun by the father of a man who became one of the most important members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the mid-twentieth century and who, in 1986, was a founding father and original member of the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra: Wilhelm Hübner. Hübner was born in Sopron in August 1914, one of the last children of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1954 he became a second violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic and for many years served in one of the orchestra’s string quartets led by Willi Boskovsky. Only once in his lifetime was a performance of the Seven Last Words missed and that was in 1945 when Eisenstadt found itself on the front line. Hübner died in 1997, a year short of the centenary of these performances, but his son Alexander has inherited and continues the family tradition in the new century.

Hübner was to act as a catalyst for the ideas of two men who, quite independently of each other, had both reached a similar conclusion: that Haydn’s music should be played in the places where he lived and worked by musicians who were, musically and geographically, the heirs to the virtuoso orchestra assembled under Esterházy patronage in the mid-eighteenth century. The two men were the conductor Adam Fischer and Rudolf Morawitz, at that time in the service of the Burgenland local government with special responsibilities at Schloß Esterházy. Fischer was a citizen of both Austria and Hungary. Born in Budapest he later studied, like so many conductors of his generation, under Swarowksy in Vienna. He had a fascination with what he described as the vernacular tradition of performing and interpreting music from this cultural borderland, despite the decades of separation under the Iron Curtain. When restrictions over border crossing were relaxed in the mid-1980s the possibility of reuniting musicians with a common musical language became a reality: ‘From the very beginning’, Fischer wrote, ‘it was extraordinary to realise to what extent Hungarian and Austrian musicians shared this traditional style of interpretation: a natural flow of ritardandi, rhythmical deviations, accelerandi and accents which make the music alive and which reveal its innate dramatic quality’.

Rudi Morawitz, meanwhile, was thinking of an annual Haydn festival in Eisenstadt with its own resident orchestra. He had heard of the frustrations of many members of Vienna’s two leading orchestras – the Philharmonic and the Symphony – about the fact that they rarely ventured beyond the London Symphonies and a handful of others. In the summer of 1986 Morawitz and Fischer met for the first time and the project was born. That autumn they invited Wilhelm Hübner to become the first President of the fledgling orchestra and to help them hand pick the players. His service as Vorstand of the VPO made him an ideal choice and, as a man of great culture and charm, he could easily persuade some of the outstanding Philharmonic members to take part.

The first Haydntage took place in the Haydnsaal at the end of May 1987. By then word had reached England and Adam Fischer’s London-based agency Harold Holt brought the enterprise to the attention of Nimbus Records, newly flush with cash following the sale of the company to Robert Maxwell. The label’s Music Director Adrian Farmer and Fischer’s agent Rona Eastwood journeyed to Eisenstadt in the Spring of 1987 and, without having heard the orchestra play a note, a contract was signed to make a recording immediately following the first festival. The idea simply sold itself and a few moments in the Haydnsaal were enough to convince Nimbus that they had found the buried treasure of Europe’s concert halls: Adrian Farmer clapped his hands twice and promised to return with microphones in June.

3 Exposition: 1987-1994

The first symphonies to be recorded were the Clock and the Drumroll – Nos 101 & 103 – on the 1st and 2nd June 1987. The remaining London Symphonies followed over the next two years and the completed set was released in late 1989. At that moment it was the only set of these works available on compact disc with those by Colin Davis, Karajan and others yet to graduate from LP. A few of the more popular nick-named symphonies were also recorded at this time – including the Farewell and the Philosopher, Nos 45 & 22 – as well as Nos 24 & 27 and the Sinfonia Concertante, otherwise known as Symphony 105. All of these works were programmed as part of Eisenstadt’s Haydntage, the annual festival at which the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra has been resident since its foundation. The Haydntage were held in the penultimate week of September and immediately preceded the recording sessions. The orchestra was then still relatively new and so the chance to rehearse and perform in public before committing each symphony to disc was obviously beneficial. The quality of the players at that time also ensured the highest standards: Rainer Küchl, a concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic since 1971, invarably led the orchestra and as a soloist in the Sinfonia Concertante was joined by three of his Philharmonic colleagues: the cellist Wolfgang Herzer, bassoon player Michael Werba and the incomparable oboist Gerhard Turetschek.

In June 1990 we finally began at the beginning with Symphony No 1 and completed the first dozen, with the exception of Nos 6-8 – Le Matin, Le Midi & Le Soir – which had been recorded the previous year. In September 1990 we started to work backwards from the London Symphonies with a disc of Nos 88, 90 & 92 The Oxford. Nos 89 & 91 were added a year later as well as two of the Paris Symphonies: Nos 83 & 85. I took over sole charge of the producer’s reins in September 1992 - making my debut in Symphonies 82 & 86 - and produced and edited every note until the series was complete by May 2001.

But in 1993 there were to be no recordings. Nimbus Records had been part of the Maxwell media group since the late 1980s and Robert Maxwell’s death in 1993 put the company in the clutches of accountants and asset strippers. Almost all recording activity that year was suspended, a situation which was thankfully repeated only once again in 1999 when there was similar financial belt-tightening. These were painful moments and inevitably cast doubt over the completion of the project, especially as others in the race – Hogwood on L’Oiseau Lyre, Goodman on Hyperion and Weil on Sony – began to drop out one by one. Nimbus succeeded first and foremost because of the commitment and determination of all of us involved and because the Directors of the company were happy to be persuaded. It didn’t sell, but the principle of ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ won the day.

4 Development: 1994

The Paris Symphonies were eventually completed in June 1994 and at the same time we entered the relatively uncharted waters of symphonies in the 40s & 50s, knowing that in some cases only Dorati had been there before us. It was a turning point for the series in many ways. The break of more than eighteen months had brought a change in Adam Fischer’s feeling for how Haydn’s music should sound which, when the records were released as Volume 3 – Symphonies 40-54 – was immediately noticed by Richard Wigmore in Gramophone:

The rapt Adagios have a chamber music intimacy and finesse while the Allegros are often appreciably faster and airier – closer, in fact, to recent period-instrument recordings – than Dorati’s. Fischer also scores in his readings of the minor-key symphonies where his leaner sonorities (minimal string vibrato here), keener tempi and nervier, more explosive manner capture more fully the music’s disquiet and desperation.

One of the things which made Adam Fischer so rewarding to work with in the studio was his receptiveness and open-mindedness, bringing to mind Louis MacNiece’s remark about W.H. Auden: ‘ideas were friendly to him, they seemed to come and eat out of his hand’. Fischer now had around him players who brought continuity and stability to the orchestra and whose musical input was invaluable: Wolfgang Redik, for example, became the orchestra’s Konzertmeister during those 1994 sessions and his experience as violinist with the Vienna Piano Trio brought an entirely new quality to the string playing, subtly different to the previous Philharmonische klang which the two Rainer’s - Küchl and Honeck - had cultivated. The orchestra’s principal cellist – Reszö Pertorini – played with the Hungarian period-instrument Festetics Quartet who at that time were busy recording Haydn’s string quartets. He was invariably at Adam’s side during playbacks and, while the content of their conversations in Hungarian was known largely to themselves, the results were always musically more interesting.

My challenge was to capture this on disc. The recorded sound had to serve the interpretative criteria and, to start from the bottom up, I insisted that we had just one double bass. The Haydnsaal is a notoriously resonant hall and two double basses could easily sound like a section of eight, clouding the sound and making it unattractively boomy. We were fortunate that the orchestra’s bass player – Franz Bauer from the Vienna Volksoper – was both an assertive player and a fine musician and not one critic ever noticed the change. What did attract comment were the small calf-skinned kettledrums hit with hard wooden sticks which became a permanent feature from 1995 onwards and the balance of the wind section – especially the unique Viennese oboes – which was brought forward. Thus the old charge of excessive resonance was dropped and the sound quality brought positive reaction: ‘the recording reveals the full detail of Haydn’s very felicitous scoring, besides having an attractive overall bloom’ enthused the authors of the Penguin Guide.

In common with many concert halls of the 18th and 19th centuries – not least the Großer Saal of Vienna’s Musikverein – the Haydnsaal is acoustically glorious with an audience but problematic when populated by microphones alone. There is no solid wall at the rear of the stage, for example, just a double-curtain and so every Eisentadt session would begin and end with the construction of an improvised wall of upended tables in order to contain and reflect the sound. Another frustration, beyond our control, was the climate of the hall. The Haydnsaal has no heating, rendering it useless from late October until the following March or April, and the air-conditioning was state-of-the-art 18th Century: we simply opened the windows. Birds inevitably flew in from time to time, but Nimbus has always declined to have a session marksman. Once coaxed out the birds never strayed far and they are there on the recording, sometimes breaking into song at the end of a slow movement. Adam, appreciative of the ‘green’ credentials of Nimbus’ minimal miking, always referred to this as ‘natural sound’ and so we rarely worried with retakes to remove them. The wide fluctuations in humidity, however, were more aggravating; what would sound warm and present one day might become hard and cavernous the next, but there was little to be done except make small adjustments to microphone placing and the orchestra’s seating to try to even things out. Perhaps one is more acutely conscious of this at the session itself and it rarely disturbed me during the subsequent editing.

5 Menuets & Trios: 1995-2001

Between 1995 and 2001 the majority of the symphonies were recorded covering the expanse between 21 and 81 and the rediscovered ‘A’ and ‘B’, or 107 and 108 in the Hoboken catalogue. The series was now seven years old and just about every permutation of releasing the discs had been tried: at least four different varieties of sleeve design; symphonies released in numerical order; symphonies released in chronological order and symphonies released in no order. The completion of the Paris Symphonies presented a chance to release the discs in box sets and so the 2 disc set of 82-87 was complemented with a box of 88-92 and the existing London set. It was at this time that Nimbus secured the right from the Esterházy’s to use their family coat-of-arms as the centrepiece of the newly designed box sets. But in setting this method of release as a precedent it was necessary to record more methodically and more quickly. The pace until 1994 had been quite leisurely with detours to record the violin concertos with Rainer Küchl and a disc of flute concertos and a symphony by Michael Haydn. From now on the sessions would have to cover ten or more symphonies at a time, spread over trips of up to two weeks. We would take up residence in the Hotel Burgenland – situated on a site bordered by streets named after Haydn, Schubert and Liszt – and become regulars at Eder, the main restaurant in Eisenstadt’s Hauptstraße, the cafés Bauer and Aspirin and Konditorei Steiner, for servings of Sachertorte.

The recording day would typically begin at 2pm and the first session would last three or four hours before the Große Pause for supper and then after an hour’s break there would be a second session lasting from 7pm until a time shortly before the kitchen at the Eder closed, usually between 10:30 and 11pm. They were long days. What helped create the special atmosphere was the fact that all the musicians were there by choice, united by a love of Haydn and a joy at playing his music in the place where much of it was first performed. In the eleven years that I was present I cannot recall a single occasion when there was a disagreement about time. Everybody wanted to be there and was happy to work until the last note was in the can. This was a quite unique situation for orchestral recording. I have been at sessions closer to home where takes have been aborted as the clock ticks past the appointed hour because players simply put their instruments down.

The fast outer movements of a symphony were invariably recorded first, followed by a batch of Menuets before supper and then an evening session devoted to slow movements. The reasons for recording movements out of sequence were entirely practical: the slow movements of symphonies from this period were often scored for strings alone and, in any case, many of the brass and wind players had commitments at the Vienna State Opera or the Volksoper, both of which give nightly performances. In order to keep the top players we had to be pragmatic about their availability and I can only recall two occasions when things were brought to a standstill, both by concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic which required universal attendance: one was a performance of Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie under Seiji Ozawa which demanded every horn player in Vienna (a concert for which, characteristically we were offered tickets) and the second was a memorial concert for Willi Boskovsky. Even then the ‘Phiharmonics’ came directly from the Musikverein and graced the session with sartorial elegance in addition to all the usual musical refinements.

The recording sessions generally followed a set pattern. Adam Fischer would often rehearse with the section leaders before the full orchestra arrived ready to begin at 2pm and then the movements for that session would be worked upon in detail. Although the tape recorders were normally switched off at this time there was still a running dialogue between the control room and the hall about questions of balance, particular effects and so on. Before the first break the movement would be run-through and recorded for listening ‘ohne Wiederholung’. Playbacks were well attended, partly out of care and curiosity and partly because of the selection of fine tea and biscuits on offer. The discussion was always democratic with Adam switching easily between three languages in his pursuit of the best ideas and solutions. Back in the hall the exposition of a movement would then be recorded two or three times followed by its second half. A final ‘concert performance’ was almost always made and this often yielded the majority of the material used on the ultimate master. Short takes were generally avoided or, if necessary, they would be made for ‘psychological reasons’, as Adam discretely whispered to the microphone: a difficult solo or tricky corner. Character, drama and spontaneity were what we wanted and, because of the inevitable conveyor-belt of movements and symphonies to be recorded, they were the qualities we listened most acutely for. ‘The vital point is that the music should be exciting and convincing’, Adam Fischer maintained, ‘a boring performance remains a crime’.

The spontaneity often resulted in some rare moments. The master used for the Finale of Symphony 33 is taken almost entirely from an impromptu performance given to a small audience which included the new American Ambassador to Vienna who was visiting Eisenstadt for the afternoon. There would be spur-of-the-moment musical decisions too. The pizzicato conclusion to the slow second movement of Symphony 35 is not by Haydn but was a suggestion I made to Adam at a playback. We were all convinced and decided to keep it and not one score-watching critic has yet to remark on it! The same is true in the Trio of Symphony 38’s Menuet: each repeat is played pizzicato by the strings which delightfully accompanies the solo oboe. We would also take time to experiment with some special spatial effects, perhaps most memorably in the Presto Finale of Symphony 73 La Chasse where at 4’13 the recapitulaion of the horn’s hunting motto is miraculously heard from one of the Haydnsaal’s neighbouring halls. Lateral thinkers with a knowledge of the geography of the Haydnsaal would know that it would be physically impossible to have moved on- and off-stage in time with the music, but such are the wonders of digitally editing overlapping takes; a technical sleight-of-hand which might have intrigued the composer. Such things can quickly tire the patience of an orchestra, however, and in the seemingly endless re-seatings which I subjected them to for recording the set of variations which make up the Finale of the Hornsignal Symphony (No 31) I had to reassure them that it would all edit seamlessly together.

6 ‘La Passione’ - the people behind the project

First, a moment to remember those who sadly died before the series was complete but whose presence and contribution will not be forgotten. Wilhelm Hübner, who died in 1997, I have already written about in the Introduction to this article. A year later his friend and colleague Gustav Swoboda died. Swoboda was a genuine Viennese, born in 1917 and a violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1952 until his retirement thirty years later. Of course the retirement was only semi-official and he continued to play regularly at the Staatsoper and in some of the highlights of the Philharmonic year, most notably the New Year’s Day concerts. I remember him as always being one of the first to arrive at every session and to find a corner of the Haydnsaal to warm-up in. He was everybody’s friend and was a living example of Philharmonische Geist, only too happy to talk about his long career in the orchestra and the conductors and personalities from another era. Adam told me that he still received royalties from recordings he had played in under Furtwängler. Lastly, one of the Hungarian violinists died in 1999 and that was Janos Papp who had been with the orchestra since the beginning. On a happier note there has been one marriage within the orchestra (not an Austro-Hungarian one!) between the viola-player Heiner and violinist Gudula Madl.

Only three people were present for every session over the fifteen year making of the series. Adam Fischer, of course, but just one member of the orchestra played in every symphony and that was the Hungarian violinist Katalin Schneider, while on the production side the engineer John Gladwyn ensured that not only did Nimbus reach Eisenstadt each year but also that every note was recorded and logged. John was responsible for driving the equipment across Europe from Nimbus’ headquarters in Monmouth, a journey which in its fifteen year total would have taken him twice around the world. His skill, patience and good-humour were essential to the smooth running of the sessions and the part he played was invaluable. Three producers have been in charge of the series: between 1987 and 1991 Nimbus’ then Music Director Adrian Farmer and his deputy Alan Wiltshire covered the recording of Symphonies 1-20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 40, 45, 83, 85, 88-104 and the Sinfonia Concertante. Following Wiltshire’s departure at the end of 1989, I joined Nimbus in January 1990 and went to Eisenstadt as Farmer’s assistant in June and September that year and for the recordings in 1991. In 1992 I assumed sole charge of producing the series and completed the remaining 61 symphonies or 57% of the total cycle. I was also responsible for editing the releases and this took my total to 89 symphonies or 84% of the cycle. There is one symphony which, in the second half of the Trio of its Menuet, has a repeat missing: an editing error which a French critic proudly announced he had spotted when he came to report on the sessions in 1990. No prizes for guessing the symphony but a reward for finding a take of the missing repeat.

The last word must be about the players and about the notable individual contributions they have made, just as the Eisenstadt orchestra in Haydn’s day was celebrated for its virtuosi. In a Gramophone review of Volume Two in the series – Symphonies 21-39 – Edward Greenfield wrote:

More than ever one registers the individual virtuosity of the various soloists in the orchestra, often challenged to the limit by fast speeds. So a movement such as the variation finale of No 31 The Hornsignal features a sequence of brilliant soloists such as Haydn himself might have been writing for in the Esterházy orchestra.

The virtuosi in Haydn’s orchestra have been well documented: the principal violin, for example, was Luigi Tomasini, dedicatee of Haydn’s three violin concertos and Haydn’s final companion at the premiere of the Farewell Symphony. Today’s Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra has been similarly fortunate in having some of Europe’s most celebrated concertmasters on its front desk. For the first four years of the project, and thus for the majority of the London Symphonies, the leader was Rainer Küchl. Küchl was appointed a Konzertmeister of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1971 at the age of twenty and, after the tragic accident which took the life of Gerhart Hetzel in 1992, he became the Philharmonic’s principal concertmaster: first among equals. On some occasions, most notably when the VPO had a Bernstein rehearsal or Muti recording session, one of his colleagues might come – Werner Hink or Erich Binder – or in keeping with the spirit of the orchestra’s founding philosophy we would have a Hungarian leader.

In 1991, however, events took an intriguing turn. Eisenstadt was staging the first Joachim Competition for violinists and a jury of international soloists and orchestral concertmasters was assembled. Küchl was on the jury and was due to lead the recording sessions which immediately followed the competition, but some crisis at the Musikverein forced him to cancel and the Haydn Orchestra was left leaderless. But not for long. The chairman of the jury was Thomas Brandis, a concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic for over two decades in the Karajan era, and now one of Europe’s most sought-after teachers and chamber musicians. Fortunately he was free for a few days and was delighted to accept the invitation to lead the orchestra in the recording of Symphonies 83, 85, 89 & 91. And there was another happy outcome of this association. Brandis introduced Nimbus to his string quartet with which we went on to make many recordings over the next ten years, culminating in a Deutsche Schallplattenpreis in the year 2000. The Berlin connection was to be central to Nimbus’ recording activity in those years and featured not only the Brandis Quartett but also the Berlin Philharmonic Octet and some of the orchestra’s great instrumentalists: among them Lothar Koch, Karl Leister, Gerd Seifert, Rainer Zepperitz and Wolfgang Boettcher.

For the recording of Haydn’s early symphonies Adam Fischer sought a more subtle and chamber-music-like quality in the orchestra’s style and sonority. In June 1990, when Symphonies 1-5 & 9-12 were scheduled, we had a different Rainer to lead: Rainer Honeck, a much younger member of the Vienna Philharmonic who had joined the group of the orchestra’s concertmasters in September 1984. Honeck, whose brother Manfred is now a noted conductor, went on to lead the recordings of Symphonies 13-20, 40, 42, 43 The Mercury, 44 The Trauersymphonie and the last two Paris Symphonies to be recorded: Nos 84 & 87.

Musically and technically these recordings were highpoints of the cycle. On one hand I felt we had finally found a way to get the best out of the Haydnsaal and on the other we enjoyed an unrivalled quality of string playing, with Honeck attracting some of his Philharmonic colleagues to the sessions including Erich Schagerl, the brothers Eckhard and Günter Seifert and Peter Wächter, who has been leading the second violins of the VPO since 1965. Another violinist who rose to prominence at these ’94 sessions was Wolfgang Redik. He had played in some of the very first recordings at the end of the 1980s but then devoted himself to his career with the Vienna Piano Trio. The reunion with the Haydn Orchestra was a happy one and Adam Fischer invited him to become the orchestra’s permanent concertmaster from 1995. None of the leaders of the VPO could have given that sort of commitment and, with the project barely halfway, it needed this stability. Redik was to prove invaluable to Fischer, making all the bowings in the parts prior to the recordings and for bringing a more modern feel to the Viennese classicism of the past. Outside Eisenstadt Fischer had begun to work with orchestras which used original instruments and informed period practice and in Redik he found an ideal musical ally who was willing to experiment with variations in vibrato and a more intimate, concertante style. Nimbus was to benefit too. Following the 1994 sessions I had a meal with Redik and the cellist Marcus Trefny, his colleague in the Vienna Piano Trio and a guest in the cello section for that year’s recordings. Having recently assumed responsibility for Nimbus’ artist and repertoire policy I was eager to add to our roster of chamber ensembles and the Trio was the right choice at the right time: they were young and on the threshold of a career that led many critics to hail them as the natural heirs to the Beaux Arts Trio. The series of recordings which I made with them between 1995 and 2001 were artistically some of the most successful in the company’s history.

The debate between modern and period instruments held a special meaning for the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra and its wind and brass sections in particular. The Viennese oboe and the Vienna F-horn are both instruments which have a unique sound and which, for all sorts of musical and historic reasons, remained untouched by developments in instrumental construction elsewhere in Europe. In the flesh both instruments have an almost primitive look about them, yet the lack of technical sophistication demands the highest accomplishment from the player. Haydn himself had been fortunate – the cornists Franz Reiner and Karl Franz were legendary in the Esterházy orchestra – and to meet the demands of such symphonies as Nos 5, 13, 31, 51 & 72 we would require the services of their counterparts today.

Viennese horn playing has a rich tradition with the musical and pedagogic legacy of men such as Gottfired von Freiburg, Josef Veleba and Roland Berger still felt by today’s generation; Von Freiburg gave the first performance of Richard Strauss’ 2nd Horn Concerto in 1943 and Berger will forever be remembered for his playing on the Solti Ring. The outstanding player of the 1970s and 80s was Günter Högner, principal horn in the Vienna Philharmonic from 1971 and one of the earliest members of the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. For the first four years of the recordings he often played alongside his VPO colleague Willibald Janezic and among countless highlights the first movement of Haydn’s 5th Symphony stands out for the extraordinary accuracy and quality of the horn playing. From 1992 until the series completion a Högner and Roland Berger pupil, Martin Bramböck, was the orchestra’s principal horn. He rose to the stratospheric heights demanded in Symphony 51 and the virtuosity of The Hornsignal itself with a characteristic fluidity and wonderfully mellow tone which make any writing for the horns a highlight of these recordings. The Finale of Symphony 39, as vehement an example of Sturm und Drang as exists in all of Haydn, has horn playing by Bramböck and Robert Lorenzi which threatens to set fire to one’s loudspeakers.

Perhaps the sound of the Viennese oboe will always arouse more difference of opinion than the horns – like a pungent Islay malt it is something you either love or loathe – but there can be no argument about the quality of players who can be heard on the recordings of the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. The earliest recordings feature Gerhard Turetschek and Klaus Lienbacher, of the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Symphony respectively. Turetschek in particular will be familiar to many thousands of record collectors, in sound if not in name, for his playing on countless VPO discs under Böhm (with whom he recorded the Mozart concerto), Bernstein, Karajan and Giulini. His utterly individual style can best be heard in the Trio of the 9th Symphony’s Menuet and elsewhere, for example in the slow movement of 88 or the Finale of 90, his personality puts its stamp on proceedings. It is something to be mourned, therefore, that illness has recently brought a premature close to the career of one of those musicians who are ambassadors of their country’s musical culture.

In the latter years of the cycle we were again fortunate with our choice of First Oboe. My expanding roster of Viennese ensembles on the Nimbus label (which by now formed a family tree from our work in Eisenstadt) embraced the wind group Quintett Wien, whose members included the Haydn Orchestra’s horn player (Martin Bramböck) and flautist (Hansgeorg Schmeiser). The oboist was the new, young principal of the Vienna Symphony: Harald Hörth. I had first heard him at a concert in Graz where he delivered the most mesmeric Britten Six Metamorphoses after Ovid imaginable and at the first recording session with the Quintett we had Haydn’s St Antony Chorale on the schedule. This was enough to convince me that Hörth had to play on the Haydn symphony recordings and from 1997 he played at every session. Highlights can be heard in almost every work, but in particular the Finale of Symphony 38, with its two cheeky cadenzas amid all the florid runs, and that symphony’s Menuet & Trio display the bright charm of Hörth’s playing. Two slow movements – of Symphonies 26 Lamentatione and 67 – also reveal his ability to arch a long phrase and lend contrasting colour to the beauty of the strings. As Adam Fischer says, it’s not what you play but the way that you play it:

Even radical supporters of period instruments agree that the personality of the player is more important than the question of what instrument he or she plays. I endeavour to choose players who feel a personal affinity with Haydn’s music, who are able to express this identity in their playing, and who react instantly and intuitively to the other players’ rubato. The vital point is that a performance should be exciting and convincing. A boring performance remains a crime, even if it is historically ‘correct’.

7 Coda

In writing this article I hope I have introduced the personalities behind the making of these thirty-two compact discs and allowed their achievements to be heard. The ability to record has been with us since the end of the 19th Century, Haydn’s 108 symphonies have been with us rather longer and yet remarkably these Esterházy Recordings are only the second complete cycle in the history of the gramophone. To stand in the empty hall after the orchestra had left for the last time was to experience a moment of mixed emotions after so many years. An uncanny quiet often descends on a studio at the end of a recording session, but this was the Haydnsaal – Haydn’s Hall – and one had the feeling that he might have been a little amused and perhaps rather proud of what we had set out to do fifteen years before.