Heidelberger Sinfoniker - Haydn: Symphonies, Vol. 24 (2021)

Joseph Haydn deserves credit as the composer who significantly developed the symphony (and equally the string quartet) in terms of its musical content, scoring and form and who ultimately canonised the symphony as the genre we know today. His First Symphony was, according to Manfred Huss, written in Lukavec Castle near Pilsen in 1759. This is where Haydn served his second aristocratic employer (after Baron Fürnberg): Count Ferdinand Maximilian Franz Morzin. Haydn had a small orchestra of 15 to 17 musicians at his disposal there and wrote his early symphonies for them. The First Symphony is also the first to be listed in the catalogue of the Dutch musicologist Anthony van Hoboken (1887 - 1983, hence the abbreviation Hob.); however, the lack of accurate evidence made it difficult even for this great Haydn scholar to determine the chronological sequence of the remaining symphonies. Hoboken originally listed a total of 104 Haydn symphonies (culminating in the twelve "London Symphonies") but musicologists have since increased the number of complete surviving symphonies to 106. This 24th volume in the Heidelberger Sinfonikder's journey through all 106 symphonies features the Symphonies Nos. 63, 38, 37, and 9.