Joseph Haydn's String Quartets

For most of my nearly 70 years of listening to music, I usually passed over the music of Joseph Haydn. I probably thought that a man who wrote 106 symphonies and 30 or so string quartets could not be a serious candidate for anything other than Tafelmusik. My loss; Haydn's music rarely explores the heights and depths of human emotions, but it is highly engaging music to listen to as I am currently discovering exploring Haydn's string quartets in a giant 10-CD box recorded for Naïve by the Quatuor Mosaïques, recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not being a Haydn fan in the past, I must have bought the box many years ago as an impulse buy.

Haydn was always so bloody cheerful! Not for him the depressions and fears in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert .... and Shostakovich! Haydn is characterised by the inventiveness of his music, his ever-present good humour, and the sheer professionalism of his writing. The recordings by the Quatuor Mosaïques come over well, with only an occasional rasp from the violins to remind us that this is a recording “on original instruments” (as the saying goes). The playing suits Haydn's music. So far I have listened to the three quartets of Op 77, and the six quartets of Op 76. Next up: the six quartets of Opus 64.