Each of Bach’s four Suites is scored for a different orchestral ensemble. Three trumpets, timpani, three oboes and bassoon join the strings and continuo (bass and harpsichord) in the Fourth Suite. Each Suite comprises a grandiose Ouverture followed by a series of dances of various characters. These aptly named “French” Overtures are based on the type devised by Lully — a slow, pompous opening section of snapping rhythms and rich harmonies leading without pause to a spirited fugal passage in faster tempo. The majestic character of the opening section returns to round out the form. The procession of dances that follows begins with a pair of Bourrées, a dance of French origin that is joyful and diverting in character. When it was danced, the steps began with a brisk opening jump, a characteristic mirrored in Bach’s quick upbeat rhythm pattern. Next is a Gavotte, a dance of moderate liveliness whose ancestry traces to French peasant music. The two following Menuets are examples of the best known of all the old courtly dances. Originally a quick peasant dance from southwestern France, the minuet had become more stately and measured by Bach’s time. The closing triple-meter Réjouissance is light and playful.

During the nine years (1712-1721) that Telemann served as music director for the city of Frankfurt, he had regular contact with the court of Darmstadt, twenty miles south, where the music-loving Landgrave (and composer-manqué) Ernst Ludwig maintained a top-notch orchestra, a large library of performance materials, and a prodigious schedule of programs; city and court frequently traded musicians for occasions when the local forces proved insufficient. Telemann remained in touch with Darmstadt for the rest of his life — in 1765, two years before he died, he wrote a suite for Ernst Ludwig’s successor, Ludwig VIII of Hesse-Darmstadt, which included parts for two horns in honor of the younger Landgrave’s passion for hunting. The Darmstadt library is one of the most important repositories of Telemann’s scores, and holds nearly a hundred suites that would have been perfectly suited to the court’s taste and instrumental resources.

The Suite in F major (TWV 55:F3) is scored for two oboes, two horns and bassoon as well as the customary strings and continuo, and gives an almost concerto-like prominence to the winds throughout. As is typical of the genre, the Suite in F major opens with a majestic Ouverture in the French manner that juxtaposes sections in broad dotted rhythms with episodes of lively instrumental exchanges. (These works, especially in Europe, are more commonly called “Ouvertures” after this opening movement.) A series of varied dances follows: a sprightly Rondeau encompassing two returns of its opening strain; a dignified Sarabande; and a pair of courtly Menuets, the second a trio for oboes and bassoon. Telemann may have intended the three closing movements to suggest a hunt, a favorite pastime at the Darmstadt court: the chase in La Badinerie; the excited conversation following a successful hunt in the quick, spirited exchanges of Réjouissance (“Rejoicing”); and a rousing Fanfare to end the day.

Haydn was swept at once into the artistic and social whirl of the capital upon his arrival. On January 8th, he wrote to Maria Anna von Genzinger in Vienna that he was “occupied in looking at this endlessly huge city of London, whose beauties and marvels quite astonished me. I immediately paid the necessary calls, such as to the Neapolitan Ambassador and to our own [Austrian ambassador]; both called on me in return two days later, and four days ago I lunched with the former.... Everyone wants to know me. I had to dine out six times up to now, and if I wanted, I could dine out every day; but first I must consider my health and second my work.” Haydn was soon befriended by an entire battalion of admirers from all social classes, including musicians, scholars, businessmen — even the royal family. He received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in July 1791, had more invitations for dinners, parties, social engagements and weekends at Britain’s best town houses and country manors than he could possibly accept, gave lessons to members of some of the city’s finest families, and made so much money that, as he later told his biographer Griesinger, “My eyes popped out of my head.” The focal point for the English mania surrounding Haydn was Salomon’s series of Friday concerts, which ran from March 11th to May 16th and featured a work by Haydn at every performance. The Symphonies Nos. 95 and 96 were composed in London in 1791 and first heard at the concerts that spring. The entire venture proved to be such a success that Haydn was easily convinced to stay for another season the following year, and to return again in 1794-1795.

For Salomon’s 1792 concerts, which ran from February 17th to May 18th, Haydn devised four new symphonies — Nos. 93, 94 (“Surprise”), 97 and 98. The Symphony No. 98 in B-flat major was begun the previous summer at Roxford, the estate of the banker Nathaniel Brassey near Hertingfordbury in Hertfordshire, and completed in London sometime before its premiere at Salomon’s concert on March 2, 1792. The Symphony’s reception by the London press and public, as was almost invariable for Haydn’s new works, was rapturous. “One of the richest treats of the season,” exclaimed the Morning Herald.

Haydn had long labored to bring formal and thematic unity to his large instrumental compositions, and the Symphony No. 98 binds together the slow introduction and the sonata-form main body of the first movement by beginning each section with the same arch-shape motive — foreboding and chromatic in the introduction, playful and diatonic as the main theme. Haydn’s mastery of motivic development — of extrapolating a logical, organic, balanced, pleasing movement from the permutations of a few pregnant melodic cells — is abundantly demonstrated by the rest of the movement, nowhere with more inventiveness and expressive power than in the dramatic central development section, which Haydn authority H.C. Robbins Landon said assumed “the proportions of an intellectual struggle.”

Mozart died in Vienna on December 5, 1791, and Haydn was stunned by news of the passing of his friend and colleague when word of the tragedy reached London. He seems to have translated both his sorrow and his admiration into the somber and dignified music of the B-flat Symphony’s Adagio. The Menuet stands at the end of a historical evolution for which Haydn himself was largely responsible — the development of a little dance form of courtly elegance into a movement of symphonic breadth and cogent expression. Formal balance and instrumental contrast are provided by the central trio, based on a charming melody led by the bassoon. The sonata-form finale is music of both wit and seriousness, the complementary emotional states that had been evoked throughout the Symphony. Haydn, however, was not a man of morbid sensibilities, either in his personality or in his music, so the dashing coda contains a delightful surprise, a ribbon of arpeggios that the composer himself would have played on the keyboard with which he bolstered the orchestra at all his London performances.