Music / “Haydn Speaks”, John Bell with the Australian Haydn Ensemble. At Albert Hall, October 20. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

A NEAR-capacity house at Albert Hall greeted John Bell and the Australian Haydn Ensemble as they performed “Haydn Speaks”.

Despite the promise of an evening that would be a “musical/theatrical/biographical” entertainment, it was fairly untheatrical evening as the centre-stage act was the Haydn Ensemble itself, directed by violinist Skye McIntosh.

As she and her ensemble – Matthew Greco on violin, Karina Schmitz on viola Daniel Yeadon on cello and Melissa Farrow on flute – worked their way through a selection of major Haydn compositions, the pleasure they took in performing and their interactions rubbed off on the delighted audience.

This was the strongest feature of the evening and their choices included familiar symphonies such as “Roxelane”, “London” and “Military“ and string quartets “The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross”, “The Bird” and “Emperor”, augmented by music selected for the ensemble by composer Alan John.

Musically, there was much to learn from this performance, the selections highlighting “Papa” Haydn’s deserved reputation as the father of the symphony and his extraordinary originality, the latter, Bell/Haydn telling us, attributable to his enforced time spent in the palaces of Eisenstadt and Eszterháza in rural Hungary where there were no distractions.

Staged by noted Shakespeare director Damien Ryan, the theatrical elements were minimal – low light with John Bell well over to stage left, a few props suggesting Haydn’s study, no periwigs, no powder and in all, a suggestion of Haydn speaking from the grave in 2022.

Bell was the glue who bound the musical selections together, occasionally engaging directly with the instrumentalists while masterfully preventing the audience from applauding between compositions by stepping at just the right moment.

He slid over Rachel McDonald’s lacklustre script in a sotto voce performance that only reached a dramatic high point when Haydn arrives in London and realises that he is truly a celebrity.

But, always a skilled comic actor, he also rendered several fleeting vignettes – the Viennese music director Georg von Reutter paying a visit to Haydn’s father to ask permission for his son to have the operation to become a castrato. Haydn Senior shows him the door.

There are also sketches of his patron Prince Paul Esterházy and of King George III – ”a good German”, we heard.

The weak point of the evening was the script itself, a strange potpourri of impersonation of the composer, narrative purportedly based on Stendhal’s written account of Haydn’s life, real letters, and some imaginary correspondence with a friend.

This meant that the narrative wavered inconsistently between first person, where Bell “was” Haydn, and third person where the narrator/correspondent made comment.

Because of this, there was little sense of Haydn himself, except for a couple of comments about his unprepossessing appearance and his inexplicable success with women.

The script is laced with anachronisms. There’s a reference to “dad jokes” and Haydn even says “ouch” at one point, a quick way of getting a laugh, but destroying the moment.

There are unresolved dramaturgical problems, too. Early in the evening Haydn tells us how his marriage failed and the couple separated, but later he purports to be returning to Vienna to be by his wife’s side, and opining that she truly loved him.

Fortunately, much of the narrative disappeared into the background, dominated by the magnificence of the music, so the audience was left satisfied.

This project has been a dream of Haydn Ensemble director Skye Mackintosh, three years in the making. She needed a playwright as a collaborator.

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