Haydn: The Seasons – Paul McCreesh

   in Early Music Today (Jun, 2017)
Paul McCreesh has gone for a large-scale performance of the kind he conjectures might have been heard in Vienna when The Seasons was first heard there in 1801, employing combined choral and orchestral forces of nearly 200 in the big choruses. Curiously, given this criterion, he has chosen to give the work in his own English translation.

Obviously the use of such massive forces carries a sense of imposing majestic grandeur, but to my ears it is a stultifying grandeur belonging to a later era, often sitting ill at ease alongside the charming freshness of so much of the score.

This impression of a dual approach is enhanced by McCreesh’s adoption …