Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

3 / 5

Joseph Haydn set foot on English soil for the first time on New Year's Day 1791. He found himself feted everywhere he went, and he was paid far more for his appearances than he had ever received during his years as court composer to the Esterhazy family in Hungary. His trip had been engineered by the London-based impresario Johann Peter Salomon, and it was through Salomon's words that the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conductor Frans Brüggen presented a musical portrait of that visit, with the actor Simon Callow, got up in powdered wig and knee britches, providing the narration.

There were perhaps a few too many words and not quite enough music, especially in the first half of the concert, though Callow's text was well researched and wittily delivered: in London in the 1780s, he observed, German musicians were hugely popular, the "Polish plumbers of their day". The main works were two of the symphonies played during that visit - No 92 in G, the Oxford, and No 96 in D, the Miracle.

Brüggen's approach to Haydn may be less fiery and exuberant than it used to be, and the OAE's ensemble was not always totally precise, but the performances were still compellingly detailed and full of bracing rhythms; the two finales had an irresistible momentum. The rest of the concert was rather bitty. There was the overture from the opera L'Anima del Filosofo, written by Haydn for London but never performed in his lifetime, and a clutch of vocal numbers confidently delivered by soprano Martene Grimson, including an aria from The Creation, which Haydn composed after he left England for the last time in 1795. Somehow, though, the whole mixture never quite gelled.

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