Brahms & Haydn

The Liebeslieder (“Love Song”) Waltzes are a charming cycle of 18 short love songs performed with four-hand piano. The pieces were composed in a Ländler style, a traditional Austrian folk dance in triple time like a waltz, and the words are drawn from a collection of folksongs and love poems by George Friedrich Daumer titled Polydora.

The Haydn Theresienmesse is one of Haydn’s six late great masses, written about the time of his more famous Lord Nelson Mass. Scored for choir, a quartet of soloists, and chamber orchestra of clarinets, trumpets, timpani, and strings, the instrumentation is very small because most of the wind players were off at war. This is a terrific, exciting mass, and it concludes with a triumphant “Dona Nobis Pacem.”