Bristol Choral Society’s latest concert was Haydn’s Creation in Colston Hall. We were joined by soloists Helen-Jane Howells, Paul Badley and David Ireland and accompanied by the Bristol Ensemble (I was particularly impressed by their flutes warbling and trilling their way through various bird noises). There were no cuts but tempi were brisk and as a result the work didn’t seem too long (there is one part where the chorus have nothing to do for quite a while). We sang from the OUP edition which meant some differences and some definite peculiarities in the English words ‘Utter thanks ye all his works’!
There was speculation that a clashing concert nearby the same night dented our audience, though when I read my account of the last performance I sang, I see that it also didn’t attract as many as it might have done. Perhaps Haydn is just a bit out of favour with audiences right now. Despite the exposure in his anniversary year of 2009, he all too often just supplies a symphony or a string quartet as a programme-filling curtain-raiser, and seems at the moment to be overshadowed by Mozart. The interest in historically-informed performance also means that his music is much less often performed by large ensembles and has all but vanished from the Proms, for example.