Although Joseph Haydn excelled in every genre, sonata, quartet, symphony, opera, he was much less celebrated in the concerto than his young friend Mozart and his turbulent pupil Beethoven. A trumpet concerto, a few concertos for the keyboard and for the violin or other instruments, a dozen or so remaining untraceable and probably lost forever.
Among this relatively thin corpus, only the Trumpet Concerto and the two Cello Concertos appear regularly in the repertoire. Long known in an edition arranged in questionable taste in the nineteenth century by Gevaert, Concerto in D major was published in a correct edition only in 1935, though of debateable attribution. It was not until the manuscript was discovered in 1953 that we were certain that it was in Haydn's hand. With beautifully virtuosic writing, it exploits all the cello’s technical possibilities, multiplying the pitfalls with lots of double stops, semiquavers and demisemiquavers which make its execution particularly delicate. Only rediscovered in 1961, the Concerto in C major was quickly recognised thanks to its undeniably melodic quality and its spectacular side combining great virtuosity with a gripping melody that’s full of life. Dating from the same period, Symphony No. 13 uses several solo instruments including a cello in the splendid Adagio cantabile which is a true cello concerto. The warm, deep sound of the 1777 Guadagnini mounted in gut strings by the British cellist Natalie Clein is particularly beautiful, recorded here during a concert in Graz in 2017. ©François Hudry/Qobuz