PapaHaydn's video: Haydn Symphony n 33 Hob I: 22 Der Philosoph 1st movement: Adagio

Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Mark Minkowski, conductor. This symphony has the same movement pattern as No. 21 and was composed in the same year, but it has a totally different sonority. Haydn replaces oboes with cors anglais, a favourite occasional tone colour in the composer's music right up to the middle of the following decade. The oboe players in the Esterházy orchestra in the 1760s were two brothers, Johann Georg Kapfer and Johann Michael Kapfer, who had earlier worked in Vienna, where they might well have played in the many operas by Gluck that feature cor anglais as well as oboe. In this symphony the dark sound of two cors anglais coupled with that of horns crooked in E flat produce a very distinctive colouring in all four movements. It is displayed to maximum effect in the opening Adagio, where the wind instruments, marked fortissimo, declaim a slow-moving theme over the steady tread of strings marked piano and the violins con sordini. A manuscript source in Modena dating from about 1790 is inscribed 'Le Philosoph', a nickname that modern editors have chosen to perpetuate. It becomes less appropriate as the symphony proceeds and earnestness gives way to high spirits. The stunning Adagio that opens the symphony represents a hybrid of older ritornello-style form and the emergent Classical sonata form. The main musical idea unfolds in the spirit of a chorale; this idea is first intoned by the horns and is answered, in an orchestrational oddity for the time, by the English horns. This chorale appears in several different keys as the movement progresses, eventually returning to the prevailing E flat major in a kind of recapitulation. The movement is further characterized by a profusion of Baroque delicacies, and suspensions and sequences abound.