Climb Every Mountain, Ford Every Sonata

by: David White

Balsam’s Haydn is comfortable side by side with Mozart and Beethoven, and while insights may be few, musicality and the composer shine through.

Not really what I meant, but in the classical music world we do prize “complete”-ness. In fact, owning a complete set of something seems to be a driving force in how someone makes a decision to buy. The Musical Heritage Society released a series of recordings in 1968, of pianist Artur Balsam performing the complete keyboard sonatas of Joseph Haydn. The 15 LP set went in mostly chronological order, and in 2021, the new Musical Heritage Society released the entire set as a complete entity for the first time.

Unlike most of the piano repertoire of the great composers of the classical era, there are few complete sets of the sonatas by Haydn. Fewer by comparison, than the number of recordings of the complete sonatas of Beethoven, or Mozart. Just to look at it as a measure of a pianist’s time: the complete sonatas of Haydn encompasses about 6 hours of time, Beethoven’s complete series is about 8 hours, and Mozart’s is about 5 hours.

Perhaps it is similar to what the world’s greatest climbers know about the world’s highest mountains – climbing Everest gets you the press, but the truly great climbers know that Everest is barely in the Top 5 (yes, there are websites devoted to just this topic). K2, Annapurna and Denali outrank the world’s highest peak in terms of difficulty…but yet, there’s no comparison in press coverage, or the number of novels written about the hubris or human effort expended on climbing Annapurna versus that of the climbs and misadventures of Mount Everest.

So what is the point we’re trying to make here (apart from the knowledge that you can find nearly every obscure fact you need to know to flesh out an essay on the internet)? Very simple – that of the peaks a pianist needs to climb, the complete peaks of Joseph Haydn’s works for solo piano are VERY uninteresting to most pianists.

And they’re right. A close examination of the sonatas of Haydn shows that you can easily scan right past many of the works. This writer collected Balsam’s complete MHS cycle (released on L’Oiseau Lyre in the UK) and found that the complete series is filled with maddening twists and turns of “colossally non-collosal” moments. (that’s my phrase, and I’m sticking to it). Haydn wrote most of the early sonatas (which aren’t even called sonatas, they’re partitas or divertimentos) for students and even threw a few tricks in there (re-using the final movement of one partita as the opening movement of the next).

Which leads us to this conclusion – this new collection “10 Great Sonatas” is really what you need. And if you think I’m thrilled to trash any works by FJ Haydn, you’re very wrong. He is undoubtedly my favorite composer of this chapter of my life (perhaps best summed up by Bob Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”)

So consider this release a service we’ve undertaken to provide you with a smashing, and consumable meal of Haydn’s finest sonatas, and (again) as the producer of his complete set, this compilation really helps to shine a light on Balsam’s performances, and Haydn’s finest keyboard moments. (To be honest, we should also have included Haydn’s exceptional Variations in F Minor, possibly his finest work for keyboard, but you can quibble with me via email.)

As with most MHS recordings of the late 1960s, you’ll find Balsam unencumbered with the strictness and “speed” oriented rules of the early music, harpsichord based approach. You’ll find here the performance of a professor – a strictly by-the-book attack, inside the margins. There’s no Horowitz moment where a wild virtuoso pops through. Balsam’s Haydn is comfortable side by side with Mozart and Beethoven, and while insights may be few, musicality and the composer shine through.

And to return to our mountain-scaling analogy, Haydn’s complete sonatas, with their conspicuous filler (although Mozart’s sonatas offer the nearly same ratio of padding v inspiration), do rank below those of Beethoven, who took the form and perfected it, much as Haydn did with the string quartet and the symphony. Even C.P.E. Bach offers more “ah-ha” moments than Haydn when it comes to keyboard works. But Haydn provides a smooth walk up a challenging slope but he never reaches a “killer zone” where only the greatest pianists dare approach.

However, most of us couch-driven explorers won’t mind two hours of beauty brought right to us.

(A last note of grievance – the respected editors of Gramophone and the Penguin Guide continue to present John McCabe as the “first” to reach a complete set of Haydn’s keyboard works. While technically correct, McCabe was the first to record ALL the works for solo keyboard, his set only differs in an important way from Balsam’s with the addition of Haydn’s Seven Last Words for solo keyboard. The rest of the works are mostly forgettable fluff – and Balsam and a few others beat McCabe to the complete sonatas by five years or more.)