‘Lovely sound, deriving from a Yamaha piano and sessions at Potton Hall in Suffolk...' Gramophone
‘If you've been collecting this series you won't need any recommendation from me, if you haven't been, you ought to start. Once again Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's Haydn sweeps the field... Another great release in a standard-setting series.' ClassicsToday.com
‘...Without letting personality obtrude, his [Bavouzet] approach is nevertheless uniquely personal. The subtlety, humour and grace of his playing is undergirded by a keenly perceptive intellectual grasp and unfailing musicality. No doubt these performances will afford pleasure and insight for many years to come.' International Record Review
In the words of Bavouzet himself: ‘Each volume of this ambitious, extended project will arrive over the years like a postcard, dispatched during my travels with scant respect for chronological considerations, but undertaken with the greatest passion for trying to convey as vividly as possible to twenty-first-century ears the boundless treasures of this sublime music.' He also notes: ‘We often forget how little information Haydn left us in the scores of his keyboard works: few indications of dynamics or of phrasing, and the briefest guides to tempo. This task is never anything other than absolutely fascinating, but for the performer it is also testing, and even risky. He must, even more than usual, create his own world, his own logic, left only to hope that, in the absence of tangible evidence, he will not distance himself too far from the composer's intentions, which remain forever unknowable'.