25 Jan 2012  Haydn’s The Seasons at Barbican Hall   McCreech and
his performers painted a collection of charming, detailed
pictures of rural life, belying Hadyn’s own professed distaste
for the text’s invitations to ‘word-painting’. The composer
famously described what he considered the overtly mimetic
sections depicting cocks growing, frogs croaking and so on as
“Frenchified trash”, but here such sonic images brought much
delight and were perfectly balanced with the more abstract
reflections contained within Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s
libretto.  After their success with The Creation (for which van
Swieten had adapted and arranged episodes from Genesis and John
Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost), the impetus for a new work seem
to have come largely from van Swieten, who eagerly proposed
another possible English language source to Haydn - John
Thomson’s poem, ‘The Seasons’. The original comprises more than
4300 lines of poetry of a philosophical nature; Van Swieten
selected, revised, re-ordered and translated, f