Haydn: Creation
City of London Festival. London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus
St Paul’s Cathedral. 24 June 2015

Haydn was a popular composer in London well before his first visit, in 1790. During that visit, according to the minimal note in the City of London Festival programme, he conducted a “hatful” of newly composed symphonies. Who writes this stuff? As well as his hatful of symphonies, he also got to know St Paul’s Cathedral, and heard one of the large-scale performances of Handel oratorios, then all the rage, in Westminster Abbey. But I don’t think Haydn would have seen St Paul’s as an appropriate venue for his 1798 Creation. It was first performed in a theatre in Vienna, with its London première in the similar acoustic of the Covent Garden Theatre. In contrast with these theatre acoustics, he enormous volume of St Paul’s created musical havoc with the sound, even from my privileged seat well towards the front. What people at the back might have heard I can only imagine.

Based on the creation myth from Genesis, Milton’s Continue reading →