I first listened to this one in Terminal A of California’s John Wayne Airport, waiting for my flight to Salt Lake City, where I had a short layover on my way back to Detroit.
I listened to it again during the layover without taking any notes, to make sure I soaked it all in.
The first movement (‘Vivace’) had some good horns and a repeated string passage I really liked, where it goes a bit quiet and an elegant, upward series of notes takes it into a brief dark passage. It never really develops into full dark mode, but it adds some spice. Around 3:15, Haydn started to use an interesting trill that for whatever reason conjured the word “Egyptian” in my head; I haven’t heard him do this up till now.
The second movement (‘Adagio’) is when I took the first sip of my coffee, a drip brew out of an Illy dispenser. The highlight here was a graceful, pretty melody shared between a high string and a low string; the Haydn historian James Webster calls this “one of Haydn’s most remarkable slow movements" due to this violin and cello duet. It was diluted by a plodding section through the middle that felt like dead air and lost me somewhat.
The third movement (‘Menuetto & trio’) has a cute, pluck-driven start, nice to hear after the last few minutes of ‘Adagio.’ It spends a lot of its time alternating between quiet plucking moments and louder full-string moments in a kind of dull way.
In the fourth movement (‘Allegro’), you can occasionally hear what I think are bows bouncing against strings, adding some physicality to the sound. The movement continually returns to fast monotone scraping on high strings, generating a sense of urgency, and there’s a cool moment of fluid, swirling descension at around 1:50 and 3:00 that I really liked the sound of.
This one was pretty lively, heavy on plucking for a change and had some noticeably beautiful passages, but didn’t make a huge impression on me overall. I didn’t save any of these movements to my Haydn playlist.
Version listened to: Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra & Adam Fischer
Length: 16:17
Next up: Symphony No. 108
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