Sunday, September 28, 2025
7:00 PM
On WCRB In Concert, reawaken your senses, reinvigorate your spirit, and celebrate the changing of the seasons with H+H! Harmonies burst through the Symphony Hall air as Jonathan Cohen leads the superlative H+H Orchestra and Chorus in that sweetest of Haydn’s The Seasons. Then, H+H's “gem of a chorus…makes a truly glorious noise” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer) as serenity gives way to rapture in Beethoven’s mesmerizing Mass in C Major.
Jonathan Cohen, conductor
Emőke Baráth, soprano
Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano
Andrew Haji, tenor
Thomas Bauer, baritone
H+H Orchestra
Joseph HAYDN “Spring” from The Seasons
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN Mass in C Major
This concert was recorded on March 30, 2025 at Boston's Symphony Hall, and is no longer available on demand.
In a conversation with WCRB's Kendall Todd, Jonathan Cohen discusses the relationship between Haydn and Beethoven, Haydn's love for nature, and the Handel and Haydn Society's 2025-26 concert season. To listen, use the player and read the transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Kendall Todd: I'm Kendall Todd from WCRB here with Jonathan Cohen, ahead of Handel and Haydn Society's concert featuring Haydn's "The Seasons: Spring," and Beethoven's Mass in C Major. It's really nice to talk to you.
Jonathan Cohen: Hi, nice to see you.
Kendall Todd: What can you tell me about this concert? Walk me through it.
Jonathan Cohen: Well, there's two pieces, as you mentioned. We're going to start the first half with "Spring" from Haydn's "Seasons," which is very apt considering the weather at the moment. The sun seems to have come out. And the music talks about the melting away of the snow and the disappearance of the winter. In fact, "Spring" opens with this great storm in the orchestra, the storm of winter, and then moves into the kind of joyful celebration of the coming of spring. In the second half, we're going to feature Beethoven's Mass in C, which he composed for Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, who Haydn worked for for so many years. I think the piece is really fantastic. It's somewhat overshadowed, probably, by his Missa Solemnis, which everybody sort of celebrates as the main religious piece of Beethoven. But the Mass in C is, yes, it's more in Haydns' style, but it's a fantastic piece. It has a lot of Romanticism and Classicism in it as well. It's really inherited from Haydn, and I think it's a piece that really deserves to be heard.
Kendall Todd: What do you learn about these pieces by playing them together that you wouldn't otherwise?
Jonathan Cohen: Yeah, that's really interesting, I think, because, you know, Haydn wrote "The Seasons" when he was an old man, because everyone, of course, knows "The Creation" very well. "The Seasons" follows in the same sort of footsteps in that he likes to describe the elements of nature and to find in the music a lot of creativity. In fact, it's quite extraordinary that a composer such as Haydn in that old age finds sort of ever more inventive creativity. It's quite astonishing and clearly Beethoven inherits a lot from Haydn. I mean, we know he writes to Esterházy when he's commissioned for the Mass in C. He writes, "I'm honored considering all the great works, the church works that Haydn has composed for you." So of course we know Haydn and Beethoven, they had a relationship of sorts, somewhat antagonistic probably at times. But it's very clear in this music, late Haydn and sort of middling Beethoven, it's kind of interesting that they share of this relationship with Esterházy, and a passing of the baton, as it were.
Kendall Todd: Tell me more about the relationship between Beethoven and Haydn.
Jonathan Cohen: Beethoven is such a force of nature and a personality unto himself that, you know, I mean, I suppose having studied somewhat with Haydn, it's clear that Beethoven follows in no one's footsteps in a way. The Mass in C has elements of it which I suppose at the time would have seemed incredibly zany, very weird, you know, little bits like when the chorus sing "in cielis,"a in the sky. We just have a sort of very high, very quiet moment when the flute just goes [Cohen sings]. I mean, it's quite sort of wacky, really. There's a classical element and a lyricism in some of the slow parts of the music and a sort of rhythmic inheritance somehow. The use of harmony and the dancing rhythms, I mean there's a clear relationship between Haydn and Beethoven somehow.
Kendall Todd: Let's talk about Haydn's "The Seasons." The Seasons is a subject that a lot of composers have written on. What makes this one unique to Haydn?
Jonathan Cohen: Sure, "The Seasons," yes. So you're probably thinking about Vivaldi's Four Seasons and many things like that. I mean this piece by Haydn, "The Seasons," I suppose it deals with it from a sense of the countryside and the people living in the countryside, the peasant folk and the celebration of the way of the seasons. The fact that the seasons are so close to people that live outside, and I suppose in the time of Haydn people would have lived much more outside than we do today. So those things, you know, they really matter. I think Haydn is really drawn to the natural world. We can hear it in his symphonies. You know, you've got the famous Parisian symphonys with "The Bear" and "The Chicken" and all sorts of things like that. Somehow Haydn's great good nature leads him to celebrate all aspects of the outdoor world. And I think we hear that a lot in all of his music. So I think the pieces like "The Creation" and "The Seasons," you can hear him celebrate the chance to use these natural world phenomenons in music.
Kendall Todd: Yeah, and he gives voice to specific peasants in this piece, right?
Jonathan Cohen: Oh absolutely, yes. In this piece we have the aria sung by the bass, an aria of the farmer who's plowing the field whistling a tune. In fact, there's a piccolo which plays in that aria and I think I'm right in saying that it's the only piece in which Haydn uses a piccollo.
Kendall Todd: Is that right?
Jonathan Cohen: Yes, to convey the whistling of the farmer. And the tune is a quote of himself, the "Surprise" Symphony. So he has the farmer whistling a famous tune, which is Haydn's own piece of music, with the piccolo, and it's very charming.
Kendall Todd: In the program notes for this concert, there's a section that talks about this sort of unusually large wind section for both of these pieces. What effect does that give to the orchestra?
Jonathan Cohen: Yes, it's a late classical orchestra in the Haydn. It's slightly smaller in the Beethoven, actually, which doesn't use trombones. In the Haydn we have three trombones and also a contrabassoon, which we don't have in the Beethoven. The large wind group is really, I mean, it is the harmonie-led aspect of the music, especially in Beethoven actually. Somehow he uses the block chords of the winds as a punctuating and supportive element of the chorus. Somehow with Haydn, the winds are slightly treated differently, in that they comment and add extra voices, sometimes more melodic interventions, let's say, in the Haydn. Beethoven really takes the wind use to more block levels, because his style of composition is a little more, kind of, blocked and angular, let's say. And the stress and the way that he puts the voices is challenging. I mean, we know from the, for example, people know the Ninth Symphony, Missa Solemnis, very angular leaps, huge fortissimos, high up for the sopranos, it's very instrumental writing for the voice, very challenging for the chorus. So there's really a lot of fireworks in the piece as well and some very, very, very tender and quiet and beautiful moments like the opening of the Sanctus and the Benedictus I think is very, very lyrical and beautiful.
Kendall Todd: What sets this mass apart from the Missa Solemnis?
Jonathan Cohen: It's much more in this slightly earlier tradition, I think, you know, as we talked about Beethoven's inheritance from Haydn and the fact that he was composing the piece -- I think he was probably, what, mid-30s, 37, 1807, something like that. He was composing the piece, as I said, as a commission from Esterházy, whom he knew Haydn had spent many decades as his Kapellmeister. So he was aware that he was walking very much in the shadow of Haydn. In fact, I believe that Esterházy, when it was first performed, absolutely hated it. It was really, for him, abominable. I guess he'd got used to hearing Haydn's masses and it was a bit shockingly different.
Kendall Todd: Yeah, I think he said "detestable" or something like that, yeah. What does this piece teach you about Beethoven?
Jonathan Cohen: There's no one for me quite like him in the risks that he takes and the demands that he makes upon the musicians, you know. In a way it's dense. One has to think a lot about things that are happening in each bar that are meaningful and that are important, you know, in certain places there'll be punctuations in the bass, or the way that the harmony is moving on and off beat, or... There's always fascinating interior information in Beethoven, and there's an element of him that wants a shock, that wants to defy the conventional, that is looking for impact.
Kendall Todd: What can you tell me about the upcoming season for Handel and Haydn Society?
Jonathan Cohen: Yes, we have a very exciting season next season. I'm really glad that we are going to be performing Saul, which is Handel's great oratorio about King Saul and his armies. There's a lot of military action in there, a lot of envy, admiration. And there's a lots of very interesting musical instruments. There's harps, and trombones, and celestes, and organ solos, and... It's a very wide-ranging and exciting piece and I'm so glad we can program that as the opening of the season. Also, other things that I'm very much looking forward to: we have our friend Carolyn Sampson who's coming to sing "Exsultate, jubilate" of Mozart and also a cantata by Telemann that I am very happy to program, actually. I think it's a masterwork by Telemann. He wrote it when he was very old. It was a cantata called "Ino," which is a continuation of the story of Semele, in a way. And it's a very psychologically dramatic cantata about Ino, who gets chased by her mad husband and jumps into an ocean and then becomes a sort of sea nymph in the afterlife. It's quite bizarre. But a lot of accompanied recitative from the orchestra takes it to a whole new level. And for me it's super interesting, that program, because one almost sees the change between the Baroque and the Classical, the sort of transition. The late Telemann is almost, in a way, preceding Haydn's great cantatas. And the Mozart, of course, is a piece of juvenilia that he writes as a very young composer. So we see that transition, and I think that's very interesting.
Kendall Todd: Awesome. Looking forward to it. Jonathan Cohen, thank you so much for your time.