This latest in Julia Cload's slowly evolving Haydn series gives us five works published between 1773 and 1780, a time when the composer's main energies were being channelled into opera. The two most familiar pieces here are the 'easy' C major, No. 48, Haydn's counterpart to Mozart's Sonata K545 and likewise murdered in many a schoolroom, and the powerful C sharp minor, with its wiry, trenchant opening Moderato and pathetic final minuet whose assuaging trio is the only late eighteenth-century music I know of set in the outlandish key of C sharp major. (Any other offers?) The other three, slightly earlier sonatas have a more capricious, improvisatory air, with frequent suggestions of Scarlatti and (especially) C. P. E. Bach—though even an apparently wayward movement like the first of No. 44 with its wildly contrasted textures and rhythmic patterns, is bound together by Haydn's mastery of long-range sonata strategy.
As with earlier discs in this series, Meridian are not bashful in their promotion of Julia Cload: the CD booklet carries eulogies from H. C. Robbins Landon and the late Hans Keller and throws in a couple of favourable Gramophone quotes for good measure. But one of these, from SJ, is hardly representative of his review (5/90) as a whole which criticizes both Cload's often ''aggressive'' playing and the piano's ''clangorous tone''. The recording on this new disc is certainly bright and resonant, with just an occasional hint of 'buzz' around the tone, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it clangorous. As for Cload's playing, there are occasional instances of that spikey, over-insistent manner which worried SJ on the previous disc—the lyrical syncopated finale of No. 39 is a case in point, but far more often here I was delighted by her eager, spontaneous-sounding engagement with the music, her wit, her feeling for the imaginative range of colour and nuance. Listen to the willowy, lean-textured grace of the opening movement of No. 39, with its subtle rhythmic flexibility, or the comic capital Cload draws from the recurrent little appoggiatura figures in the corresponding movement of No. 44 on her strong sense of cumulative growth in the extended minuet finale of the same work, the polyphonic F minor episode tenderly voiced and inflected (though she perceptibly alters the character of the main theme by playing the very first note as a quaver, where the reliable Christa Landon edition—Schott—gives a semiquaver).
Any reservations I had here stemmed less from Cload's occasional over-forcefulness than from her tendency now and again to take rhythmic flexibility to extremes, caressing the moment at the risk of the music's flow and structural coherence. I'm thinking particularly of the outer movements of the C sharp minor (the rhythm of the finale often sounds limping) and the Adagio of the C major, which is indulged at lengths this innocuous music will not bear, with the frequent blurring of the pulse. But pleasure in Cload's playing certainly outweighed these relative disappointments. And to restore the critical balance, let me commend her performance of the much maligned outer movements of the same sonata, the first a thing of untrammelled wit and brio (how different from the mincing, prettified readings one often hears), the finale delighting in the variety of meaning to be found in the dotted rhythms of the opening bar and, like many other movements here, benefiting from the full value Cload gives to Haydn's fermate.'