Haydn Piano Sonatas Volume 5 – Bavouzet

Something odd happens around the tenth minute of any Haydn keyboard sonata — the composer, having lulled you with what seems a perfectly conventional gesture, suddenly wrenches the harmony sideways, or drops out the bass, or repeats a phrase one time too many, grinning the whole while. Bavouzet understands this. He plays these sonatas as if the joke might land differently every night, which is, I think, exactly right.

This fifth installment in his Chandos survey brings together works separated by decades: the modest three-movement sonata in G, Hob. XVI:12, alongside the more expansive, almost symphonic writing of Hob. XVI:40 through 42, products of Haydn’s final London-adjacent decade. The juxtaposition is instructive. You hear the Wagenseil-inflected galant charm of the earlier pieces give way, disc by disc, to something weightier: harmonic ambitions that anticipate Beethoven’s op. 2, textures that could not exist without Haydn’s exposure to the Broadwood instruments he encountered in London in the 1790s, their fuller sustaining power and wider dynamic range.

Bavouzet’s fortepiano this is not. He plays a modern grand, recorded with unusual immediacy at Potton Hall — you can hear the felt of the hammers, practically, in the softer passages — and he doesn’t apologize for the instrument’s resources. Some listeners raised on the wiry astringency of period recordings may find his sound too plush, his sforzandi too easily achieved. I don’t share that reservation. There’s a difference between anachronism and stylistic tone-deafness, and Bavouzet never confuses the two. His ornamentation in repeated sections is scrupulous and tasteful, never merely decorative. He seems to be discovering the ornaments in real time, the way Haydn’s own improvisatory instincts likely worked.

Tempi run brisk throughout, sometimes startlingly so. The opening Allegro of Hob. XVI:22 fairly sprints, a hair under the pace most pianists take, McCabe and Brendel included. Yet nothing feels rushed or glib. Bavouzet’s articulation stays crystalline even at speed. Where he does slow down, in the Adagio of Hob. XVI:41, the effect is disproportionately moving precisely because he has husbanded expressive weight so carefully elsewhere. Wit and pathos are not opposites in Haydn. They’re often the same gesture, differently lit.

I confess a certain proprietary fondness for John McCabe’s pioneering Decca traversal, which first taught me that these sonatas deserved the same seriousness we grant Mozart’s. Brendel’s selective survey on Philips remains a touchstone for sheer pianistic intelligence, even at only eleven works. Schiff brought his customary clarity; Hamelin, unsurprisingly, found the virtuosic corners other pianists smooth over. Bavouzet doesn’t erase any of that history. He adds to it, with a freshness that suggests he’s still finding things in these scores after four previous volumes.

The engineering deserves a word: Potton Hall’s acoustic gives the piano bloom without blur, a bright halo around each attack that never turns clangorous. Chandos’s documentation, with Bavouzet’s own annotations, is generous and genuinely useful rather than pro forma.

Has any pianist made a more persuasive case, disc by disc, for Haydn’s sonatas as a body of work worthy of the attention we lavish on the late quartets? I doubt it. Here’s hoping Chandos doesn’t make us wait too long for volume six.