Haydn composed his Cello Concerto No. 2 around 1783 in Esterhazy, although at one point the piece was attributed to Anton Kraft, a renowned cellist in Haydn’s time. The rediscovery of Haydn’s original manuscript at the Austrian National Library in 1954 ended any doubts about Haydn’s authorship of the piece. Along with Cello Concerto No. 1 (ca. 1761-1765) that was not discovered until 1961, these two concertos by Haydn have been among the most popular cello repertoire since then. What stands out in the outer movements of the D-major concerto are the sparkling scale passages with frequent double stops, octaves and even tenths all over the cello’s high and low registers. Such full technical display requires a virtuoso cellist like Anton Kraft, who likely premiered the piece. The aria-like middle movement Adagio, by contrast, features great lyricism through the singing solo cello line. A joyous Rondo concludes the concerto, where the dance-like main theme alternates with two episodes.

It was a common performance practice for a conductorless chamber group to perform reduced concert works in the 18th and 19th century, including concertos and operas. Johann Peter Salomon, who worked as Haydn’s concertmaster and was known for bringing the composer to London, transcribed several Haydn symphonies for flute, keyboard and string quartet. In the current cello quartet-accompanied version of the concerto, most of the accompaniment parts is extracted from the original string parts by Haydn, with some octave changes to fit the cello’s range. Although the wind parts are omitted in passages where they double the strings, significant wind solos are covered in this arrangement. Many appoggiaturas in the first movement have been notated as sixteenth notes like how they would be performed. Fingering and bowing suggestions have been given for the accompaniment parts, while the solo cello part is basically unedited. No suggested cadenza has been given.

-Ka-Wai Yu