Haydn: Cello Concertos (Nos. 1 & 2)

MUSIC WITHOUT DOGMA: MISCHA MAISKY PLAYS
JOSEPH HAYDN
The truth? No one should be afraid of it, and yet we need to be on our guard against those who would seek to protect it. There are many different ways of living our lives, insists Mischa Maisky, just as there are many different ways of dressing, eating and worshipping various gods. This variety is wonderful as long as no one claims that they have a monopoly of the truth. It is then that the problems begin. The Latvian cellist, who was born in Riga in 1948, speaks from experience. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where the watchword was: if you re not with us, you re against us. A dangerous mentality like this creates fear. This is precisely how totalitarian systems come into existence.
When Mischa Maisky emigrated in 1972, he felt as if he had been reborn. Life started anew for him. He had studied with Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory, but after leaving the Soviet Union he worked with Gregor Piatigorsky in Los Angeles. In Moscow he had already won a prize in the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition. Seven years later he won the Gaspar Cassadó Competition in Florence. His acclaimed début in Leningrad was followed by a memorable recital in New York s Carnegie Hall. But above all the cellist no longer wanted to face the problems he had had to endure in the Soviet Union, where his life was closely monitored, where tastes were dictated and where Mother Russia knew best. He no longer wanted such musical indoctrination and aesthetic dogma. Think of Biblical exegesis! The texts can be translated and interpreted in different ways. It s the same with great music. The better the music, the more ways there are to play it. All ways are in order, though two are forbidden by the laws of music: to play great music in a way that is ugly or boring.
Mischa Maisky s dislike of people who claim to have a monopoly of the truth may be one of the reasons why he loves Bach and Beethoven and feels a particular affinity for Haydn and Shostakovich, two composers whose music contains hidden depths that allowed them to resist the demands of their superiors by means of humour, obstinacy and encoded messages. Haydn Kapellmeister to the princes of Esterházy in Vienna and Eisenstadt and later at the Palace of Eszterháza that soon became known as the Hungarian Versailles conducted his artistic experiments with intellectual pleasure, a gay science of composition that was both playful and rational at once. As head of an orchestra, Haydn recalled, I could experiment, observing what was effective and what weakened that effect. In that way I was able to improve, to add, to cut away and to take risks.
We should not imagine that Haydn s orchestra the prince s court band was a large sym-phony orchestra like the ones familiar to us today. Rather, it was a chamber ensemble made up in 1761, when Haydn entered the Esterházys service, of only twelve players, including the Kapellmeister himself. In other words, it was an orchestra that consisted entirely of soloists, whom Haydn endowed with concertos scored variously for violin, cello, violone, flute, horn and bassoon. Unfortunately few of these early works have survived. The dazzlingly virtuosic Cello Concerto in C major Hob. VIIb:1 was not rediscovered until 1961, almost two centuries after Haydn had written it for his principal cellist, Joseph Weigl. The D major Concerto Hob. VIIb:2 was composed in 1783 for Weigl s successor in the Esterházy orchestra, Anton Kraft, a player whose beautiful, full tone was as highly praised by his contemporaries as the ease and assurance of his masterly playing. No more cellos concertos by Haydn have come down to us, and so Maisky has transcribed one of the composer s violin concertos for his instrument, adopting a practice widespread in the 1