Haydn's Trumpet Concerto is fairly well known; but there are not many people who will have heard it on the instrument for which it was composed. In Haydn's day the trumpet was, of course, simply a shaped piece of tubing, and could therefore produce only the notes of the natural harmonic series which is why Haydn's and Mozart's orchestral trumpet parts do little other than reinforce the main chords of the music. The valve, which permits chromatic notes to be played and the trumpet to be a melodic instrument across its compass, had yet to be invented. But Anton Weidinger, a trumpeter in the Vienna court opera devised as early as 1795 a trumpet with a series of holes, covered by keys; when the holes were opened different series of notes became available. Haydn's concerto, and Hummel's a little later, were written for this instrument.
The soloist here, Friedmann Immer, uses a keyed trumpet built, on the model of Weidinger's, in 1984; it lacks the crispness and brilliance of a modern trumpet, but has a warm, more rounded tone and a characteristic, almost 'chuffy' attack to some of its notes. It sounds, not surprisingly, appropriate to the music and its intonation is pretty good. What I find particularly attractive is the effect it has on the way the music is perceived: the instrument makes clear (in a way that a modern one does not) just what is new about Haydn's trumpet writing in the concerto—the chromatic passages, the filling in of phrases that on the normal instrument of his day would be left gappy—and makes different passages sound difficult (or easy) as compared with a valved trumpet. Its tone, inevitably, is rather uneven, but Haydn laid the music out carefully, for the most parts so as to mitigate any clumsiness of effect. Immer plays tastefully and with spirit, and the Andante is duly expressive; and the AAM under Christopher Hogwood provide prompt accompaniment. I should perhaps stress that this isn't a 'perfect' performance, in terms of modern technique, but I doubt whether it could be done much better on this instrument and am sure that Haydn never heard a better one. But he might not have liked Immer's overlong and shapeless cadenza in the first movement.
The other two works are both much earlier: the little Organ Concerto written in 1756 (probably for the ceremony at which the girl Haydn loved took her nun's vows, though no less cheerful for that), the Horn Concerto in 1762. Hogwood plays the Organ Concerto gracefully and neatly, on a silvery-sounding chamber organ (modelled on an English early eighteenth-century instrument). The central Largo has particular charm. Timothy Brown, using a natural horn of the early nineteenth century, gives a very polished reading of the Horn Concerto: here again the use of a period instrument gives the music an altogether different character, most obviously in the stopped notes whose muffled quality (caused by the insertion of the hand into the bell) is part of the music, lost when a modern valved horn is used. Brown's playing, agile yet restrained, and always well controlled, presents this easygoing piece very attractively. The recordings giving a welcome prominence to the woodwind in the organ and trumpet works, are clear and true and benefit from a fairly spacious acoustic.'