Hello,

Back with another Haydn sonata. This one is perhaps even less well-known than some of the other early/middle sonatas. The first movement is particularly novel, with its unceasing dotted rythm motifs. The adagio exhibits a slightly more expansive, deeper sound, perhaps pointing toward Beethoven. The presto, like many of Haydn's finales, seems reminiscent of an energetic, perhaps even bawdy, country dance.

Thanks for listening.

Joe


Haydn - Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI/21 - 1: Allegro (5:59)
Haydn - Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI/21 - 2: Adagio (6:00)
Haydn - Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI/21 - 3: Presto (2:13)

Nicely played. I don't have as many comments to make about this one as I had with no 13, in fact I have nothing at all to say about the 1st movement.

One thing which caught my ear in the 2nd movement seems to be editorial, since you do it both times. In the 6th last bar of the first section, my LH notes are (F# A), G, and then another G an octave down. You omit this second G, and I think this must be an error in your score. You also do a rit two bars later which I wasn't expecting.

Finale: The upbeats to bars 5 and 6 in my edition are the same as those to bars 1 and 2, i.e. unadorned 8ths. You play them the same way as later on, with mordents or triplet 16ths.
There is cuckoo-like pattern in bars 30-32 and 35-37, which comes again about 18 and 13 bars from the end of the second section. I like the way you play them in the first section, but in the second section I think there is too much pedal.
You are inserting an unprinted pause at the end of the first section which I wasn't expecting. I have just one 8th rest before the upbeat on the repeat, or two 8th rests when continuing, because the second section upbeat is silent. You are giving it 4 or 5 8th rests.

Joe,
I just had a listen to this one with score in hand (took the day off today). First I want to commend you again for this fine project; this will be an excellent contribution to PS and for all those that search for Haydn's sonatas to listen to!

You can be quite detailed in your critiques so i'll go a little farther than I usually do. First of all it might be helpful to know what edition you are playing from. I have the scholarly Urtext Edition published by Schott/Universal Edition (Vienna) Edited by Christa Landon (text) and Jonas (fingering, who cares, not me).

Movement 1: In general (throughout actually) you perform with fine musicality, good observation of the rhythms and nice attention to voicing, with really good ornamentation. I have a comment regarding the tempo. For me, your tempo of Allegro in 2/4 was more like Andante and I would have wished for it to go faster. I can tell that the RH is some difficult terrain for high speed, but as I marked your beats (tempo) it just never felt like Allegro. Do you have staccato marks in your score? E.g. m17?
m45: Though the music comes to a momentary repose, the tempo should not, IMO, and I feel that you take too much time to get things going again.
m57: Same comment. I don't wish to insult your intelligence by any means here but just to clarify a point: The repeat sign is just a convention to save writing effort (and helps demarcate form) but if the repeat of the exposition were written out, it would become clearer that no pause in the tempo is indicated. I'm not asking here for metronomic time keeping, but I feel your approach is not appreciable as a continuing of the meter, rather as a definite pause in the tempo.

Movement 2: Again, this is really fine playing.
m7; I would ask you to consider your approach to the appoggiatura, in that this is a lyric movement in Adagio tempo, so that a long-appogiatura is better suited than the almost-acciaccatura approach you do here, though to be fair, my score has it as a 16th note (semiquaver) which the preface indicates is "according to Haydn's notation."

Movement 3: I like very much the tempo and spirit of your interpretation. The ornaments are well-integrated. I think you could do a bit more with the hemiolas that occur here and there (e.g. 28(2nd beat)-30, 38(2nd beat)-40, and repeat at 108-111 and 113-116).
m48: See comment for m57 of movement 1 above.

That is all, and it is mostly some nit-picking. In general you play it extremely well and my most substantive issue has to do with how you manage the tempo across some of the seams of the work.

I hope to get to the other one perhaps later today. I hope this helps in some way; most certainly I salute your effort AND product!

Best,
Eddy

Eddy,

Thanks much for the detailed comments. I appreciate this kind of critique in particular.

You make some excellent points. The only one I'm not sure I'm in agreement with is regarding the tempo in the first movement. One of the difficulties with tempo in Haydn is the plethora of note values and this movement is no different, with its 32nds in dotted rhythm, 16th triplets and eighth note bouncing patterns in the LH. I'm sure it would be possible to play it faster but I wanted the dotted rhythm and the overall tempo to be precise, so I'm not sure it could go too much faster (at least for my purposes). On that note, I would also say that tempo is always relative (i.e., it depends on the note rhythmic groupings and the most difficult figurations in the piece). And Allegro of course in Italian means lively or cheerful, not fast (necessarily), and I think every Allegro is going to be a bit different and shouldn't necessarily be taken literally.

Anyway, I don't mean to go on too long. Thanks again for your detailed listening.

Joe

Rainer,

Thanks much for your comments on this one, too.


Joe

I trust the experts that these are fine recordings. They are on the site, please check all is ok.

I'm inclined to agree. My copy has an editorial moderato added in brackets after the Allegro marking for the first movement. If you want it allegro, I think it would have to be a 4/8 allegro, whereas if you prefer to feel it in 2/4, it has to have a correspondingly more sedate pulse. For me, your tempo is just right, but I do agree with Eddy that the coffee breaks at 45/57 are not appropriate. I must not have been paying enough attention when I listened, or I would have commented on it.

Thanks, Chris. The only error I noticed is that for this sonata it says E Major instead of C Major, both on the links in this thread and on the site.

You're both right. Looking at the score again and listening, I see that I wait too long in those places. I might actually cheat and edit to whittle that silence down, since it's such an easy edit to make.

Ok that is fixed. Actually you should start putting ID3 tags in your mp3's to save us that work, and reduce the chance of this kind of errors. And I should finalize and publish the rules for naming and tagging (for some reason I seem to be procrastinating with that fir years).

Wow! Those are really great recordings. You sir really played it very well. I am no expert but I do know what a piano music is good to listen, even if you repeatedly play it over and over again. Good day guys.