Symphony No. 22 in E flat major ("Philosopher"), H. 1/22
Sinfonia for strings in F major ("Dissonant"), F. 67 (BR C2)
Symphony No. 47 in G major ("The Palindrome"/"Letter L"), H. 1/47
The Alpha label's Haydn 2032 series, produced in collaboration with the Joseph Haydn Stiftung (or Foundation), may be optimistically conceived. It's hard to say in what form Haydn will be absorbed in 2032; a guess could be something like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Be that as it may, the series apparently will have a pair of organizing principles. The first is that individual programs will be loosely thematic rather than simply running in numerical sequence. Here, that idea doesn't work out so well. The title "Il Filosofo" ...
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The Alpha label's Haydn 2032 series, produced in collaboration with the Joseph Haydn Stiftung (or Foundation), may be optimistically conceived. It's hard to say in what form Haydn will be absorbed in 2032; a guess could be something like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse. Be that as it may, the series apparently will have a pair of organizing principles. The first is that individual programs will be loosely thematic rather than simply running in numerical sequence. Here, that idea doesn't work out so well. The title "Il Filosofo" or "Der Philosoph" for Haydn's Symphony No. 22 in E flat major, Hob. 1/22, seems not to have been Haydn's own and to have been derived later on from a superficially dialogue-like passage near the beginning. And it's hard to see how the other two Haydn symphonies on the album fit into the plan. But the news is better with the second principle, under which each album will combine several Haydn symphonies with one by another composer. Nobody has done this, and it works brilliantly...
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