The indefatigable folks at Holland's Brilliant label have turned their budget-minded efforts to Haydn, with the usual mixed results. On the positive side of the ledger are some competent recordings of Haydn's settings of Scottish songs, which are not otherwise abundant. The complete run-through by the
Haydn Trio Eisenstadt has several advantages, even if few listeners are going to want to hear three CDs of Scottish song settings on end. The volumes are divided up in the same way they appeared in Haydn's time, corresponding to the various publishers who issued them, and by listening to a lot of the songs you get a feel for the whole enterprise. Along with the vogue for Scottish literature in the late eighteenth century came public enthusiasm for Scottish songs, the melodies of many of which were collected by Robert Burns and another editor in an ongoing series called The Scots Musical Museum. Many composers, including Beethoven, made settings of these tunes, for one or more voices with piano trio. For this group, commissioned and issued by the Edinburgh bookseller William Whyte, Haydn was apparently sent the music but not the texts, which were metrically grouped by the publisher and attached to the music afterwards. Although something less than the "important part of Haydn's late oeuvre" claimed by annotator Andreas Friesenhagen, they're something more than the thoughtless cash cow they have usually been taken to be, with clever instrumental codas that seem to match the mood of the text. Haydn had the titles (which, it's true, like the names of old hymns, sometimes bear no relation to the text at all), and he had made extended trips to England and probably figured out something about what he was setting. In a poem like Burns' powerful The Soldier's Return (CD 1, track 11), you have something less than a full meeting of two genius minds but something better than a random process. And, in the very first song in the set, you can hear how Haydn turned "Auld Lang Syne" into a little strophic Viennese aria. (The song wasn't as famous at the time as it is now; its current celebrity was the work of Canadian-American bandleader
Guy Lombardo.) An interesting feature of this late set of songs is that Haydn apparently delegated some of the work to his student Sigismund Neukomm; Friesenhagen hazards a guess as to which these were, and listeners can make their own guesses. On one hand that highlights the rather interchangeable nature of these songs, but one could also argue that, like Mozart's Requiem mass, they show the skill of the composer as teacher in the difficulty of distinguishing the work of master and student. Texts are given in English, with German summaries. The annotators state elsewhere that the publishers tended to avoid songs in heavy Scots dialect, but there are several here; unfamiliar words are translated in footnotes. Both soprano
Lorna Anderson and tenor
Jamie MacDougall have an unaffected enjoyment for the music and keep it restricted to its natural dimensions. The musicians record in Esterháza palace, where Haydn himself created this music almost 200 years ago; its ambience is entirely appropriate.