Anglicised Haydn? Worry not if the ballad on the first track seems a travesty, the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No 74 not performed allegro assai as marked but slowed to a pastoral andante, to pastoral words. You’ve probably guessed: this disc is largely about adaptations and changes in character – to entertain. So, for example, nine German Lieder from 1781-84 now emerge as smoothly tuneful songs.
What Derek McCulloch also describes as ‘translations, free interpretations, free paraphrases and unrelated text substitutions’ (detailed in the booklet) are for the delectation of late-18th-century English audiences.

Instrumentalists are not always secure but are competent in songs such as ‘Contentment’, ‘An Old Story’, ‘The Comforts of Inconstancy’ or ‘Life is a dream’, sung by Emma Kirkby and Rogers Covey-Crump. If Kirkby’s diction is sometimes vague, Covey-Crump’s is cleanly articulate, but their portrayals are anodyne. Contributions from the others aren’t different, as soothingly suave and titillating but of little interpretative depth. The lack of rhythmic inner life palls too. Direction seems uninspired and presentation is absurd. In every item, the musicians are caged stage right with no natural spread.

Haydn purified, perhaps heightening enthusiasm for a visit after the abortive invitation to London in 1783 from a great admirer Willoughby Bertie, Fourth Earl of Abingdon, still alive when Haydn eventually arrived eight years later. Appropriately, this programme was recorded at Rycote Chapel, once part of the now defunct Abingdon family seat in Thame, Oxfordshire. Does Richard Bertie, the Ninth Earl, carry a torch for Haydn today?