Haydn: Stabat Mater - The English Concert & Choir, Pinnock

Joseph Haydn
Stabat Mater
Rozario, Robbin, Johnson, Hauptmann,
The English Concert and Choir, Trevor Pinnock
Archiv 429 733-2

At last there is a Haydn Stabat mater within easy reach. The piece is seldom performed and even more rarely recorded, and this despite the fact that it contains some of the composer's most rich and deeply felt writing. One of the few works not written to order (Prince Nikolaus Esterházy was less than keen on encouraging the sacred duties of his Kapellmeister) the Stabat mater is also one Haydn himself grew to respect highly, and Trevor Pinnock's performance makes it clear why.
The Feast of the Seven Sorrows inspired in Haydn writing of similiar length, gravity and meditative concentration as the Seven Last Words were to do some 20 years later. But the almost unrelieved sobriety of minor keys and slow turning harmonies were subtly offset by a wonderfully acute instinct for pulse, melodic shape and vocal and instrumental colour. It is these elements which Pinnock and his colleagues enjoy to the full.

There is Anthony Rolfe Johnson, for instance, ideally cast to care for the opening's long, bending lines, slightly distorted by syncopation, and to catch the breath in the "dum emisit spiritum". There is Cornelius Hauptmann, not over-characterful of voice, yet splendidly incisive in the dislocated rhythms and jagged line which expresses simultaneously the violence and the indignation at the scourging.
When it comes to the almost Handelian length and strength of Haydn's melodic line, it is Catherine Robbin and Patricia Rozario who come into their own. They, too, are cunningly cast. The energetic leaps from chest to head voice in which Haydn both expressed and manipulated response to the Virgin's grief, catch the flare at the top of Robbin's voice, especially where it tunes in to the cor anglais with which Haydn replaces the oboes in the "0 quarn tristis".

Just as her mezzo flows into the upward spiral of sympathy in "Fac me vere tecum flere", so the gummy legato of Rozario's distinctive soprano creates melismas to rival those of any oboe in the "Sancta mater" duet. Some listeners may well prefer a voice of more conventional purity and high agility in this part, but the unique tint of Rozario's soprano plays its own role in the cumulative power of the performance, and nowhere more so than in the sudden surfacing "Amen" in the final vision of Paradise.

Unequal temperament, the pungency of The English Concert's woodwind soloists, the often glaring brightness of its strings all make their mark on the work's sensibility. There are passing moments where they strive for unnecessary effect, such as in the long decrescendo over the chorus's "Gladius" which sounds over-engineered. But the strength of the chorus's inner parts, the near spiccaio kindling of the strings in hell, and the sensitivity to Haydn's high fibre string writing in this piece compensates for any passing weakness.

H., Gramophone Magazine