Music-lovers of two centuries ago, without benefit of records or radio, and with a concert life even in London much slenderer than today's, could get to know the masterpieces of music only by playing them in some kind of domestic version. Hence the numerous publications of reductions for keyboard, or for flute, of popular pieces, or the books of 'favourite airs' from current operas. Haydn's ''London'' Symphonies, of course, enjoyed unequalled success in the concert room; so it is understandable that the man who instigated their composition Johann Peter Salomon, should have made arrangements of them suitable for amateur musicians. He chose the unusual but relatively readily available forces of flute, string quartet and accompanying piano.
It is entertaining to hear these two great symphonies in the form in which many people of Haydn's time must first have heard them, and certainly the transcriptions are done with ingenuity and intelligence. But one ought not to press this too far. These arrangements give you many of the notes of the symphonies, but not their substance. Listen, for example, to the opening bars of No. 104, with their grand and spacious gesture, which depends for its proper, rhetorical effect on the sound of a full band. This is not the language of chamber music: as you listen to this reduced version, you are aware of a real disparity between idiom and medium. And this persists. You will note too the reduction of Haydn's disciplined, highly functional use of orchestral colour to a virtual monochrome. The Military without trumpets, clarinets or drums isn't really very military.
Well, I don't want to be too negative. The performances here are strong yet often elegant, with Linde's playing as shapely as always and the strings capable and dependable. Repeats are duly observed; indeed, the whole frolic (for that is what recording symphonies in chamber arrangements is) is taken pretty seriously. Christopher Hogwood recorded just these same two works not long ago for L'Oiseau-Lyre, with (aptly) the Salomon Quartet and Lisa Beznosiuk, in readings a good deal swifter in the quick movements and generally livelier, and his versions seem to me decidedly preferable—altogether closer to the spirit of the music. But make no mistake: these arrangements are not substitutes for the originals but make-shifts, promoted to a spurious importance by present-day curiosity about the things people did in eighteenth-century drawing-rooms; and abuses of a composer's intentions are not necessarily better because they are older. But if you share that curiosity, you should enjoy this agreeable record or the livelier L'Oiseau-Lyre version.'