Gabrieli Consort & Players, Barbican, London

Only an 18th-century composer could have written a work as sweetly innocent as Haydn’s The Seasons. Its vignettes of a pre-industrial landscape – the pretty maidens “ruddy, fresh and wholesome”, the huntsmen on the autumn chase, the girls at their spinning wheels – describe a world largely gone. And, if global warming does its worst, even its portrayal of the four seasons may seem askew.

Aloft in its cloudless sky of optimism, the Gabrieli Consort and Players launched their 30th anniversary year at the weekend. In the past founder Paul McCreesh and his colleagues have made a name for themselves by recreating specific historical occasions, including mega-sized performances of Haydn’s The Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah at the BBC Proms last year, but this time everything was on a normal scale.

Instead, the novelty of the event lay elsewhere. Rather than use any of the existing English versions of Haydn’s The Seasons, McCreesh has gone back to the original English poem by James Thomson that was plundered for the libretto and written his own. The result is eminently singable and it is interesting how hearing the work sung in English throws up unexpected reference points. Suddenly, the chorus “Wonderful, bountiful, infinite God” sounds as if it has stepped out of Handel’s Messiah. (We know how thrilled Haydn was by a performance of Messiah at Westminster Abbey on his visit to London in 1791.)

Of the three soloists, it was Christopher Purves as the bass Simon who really made the English words come alive, singing with a generosity of spirit that reflects what The Seasons is all about. Christiane Karg, the soprano Hannah, was clean and clear, but not very expressive. Allan Clayton’s tenor Lucas, though short at the lower end of his vocal range, made the lambent beauty of his brief cavatina “Exhausted Nature” one of the highlights of the evening.

McCreesh used a chorus of about 30, which was well judged for the Barbican (anything smaller tends to get lost). Compared with René Jacobs, whose recent recording pulls the music around to sometimes thrilling results, he played with a straight bat, getting rhythmically incisive playing and inspiring his Gabrieli performers to music-making of infectious vitality. In this work, above all, Haydn demands no less.

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