Boston Baroque - Haydn Creation - Gramophone

Martin Pearlman's Boston recording has many virtues. Soloists apart, differences centre on the choir-here mixed, and rather smaller (25 singers to Weil's 32)-and one or two tempo choices: slower, to the music's advantage, in Chaos and the first sunrise, faster, at the expense of Haydn's prescribed maestoso, in the bass aria ‘Nun scheint in vollem Glanz der Himmel'. Iin the main, choral singing and orchestral playing are splendidly alive, whether in the depiction of the seething oceans in ‘Rollend in schäumenden Wellen' or the delightfully ‘woody' wind textures in the trio ‘Zu dir, o Herr, blickt alles auf'.

Pearlman's soloists are all accomplished. Best is Kevin Deas, a fine, teak-voiced basso cantante with as sonorous a low register (including a ripe bottom D-virtually D flat at Classical pitch-on ‘Gewürm') as any Raphael on disc.