Philiv KAENNICOTT Composer-friendly audiences and audience-friendly composers - Haydn wrote in a wonderfully rich era

The Naxos Haydn edition has been arriving like paving stones packed in cardboard. The piano sonatas, the string quartets, the concertos, and now, my favourite, the symphonies. It's been an addiction for a week now.

change substantially. Then there's the sheer productivity, the 108 (give or take a few) works, which require 34 CDs to contain them. And while some would quibble with some of the early and middle symphonies, Haydn's music is astonishingly consistent, inventive and inspired. I've been listening both randomly (pick a disc, any disc) and selectively (I particularly love Nos 49, 63, 73 and everything he wrote for his London visits), and I have yet to find the music sinking into the background. There's no note-spinning, which I have to confess I sometimes think afflicts Mozart in his divertimenti.

It's a mixed bag of performers brought together for the Naxos edition. Their combined efforts would be stronger if many of the flamboyant later symphonies hadn't been given to the Cappella Istropolitana, who under the baton of Barry Wordsworth simply miss too many opportunities to capture Haydn's rollicking eccentricity. But that's a small quibble given the overall level of performance, which is generally high, and never so poor in particulars as to ruin one's pleasure in the set.

There aren't many composers who one enjoys listening to chronologically. Unless the composer went crazy (like Schumann) or otherwise lost his or her abilities, we tend to concentrate on the fruits of their artistic maturity. For years I've kept the old Philips Mozart edition on hand, but I use it like an encyclopedia, and mostly gravitate to the later works.

"symphony" seems a bit / haphazard by the integrated and / cross-referential standards of his - later works.

The paradox of Haydn is that he lived long enough to earn different musical worlds. And yet there is a continuity throughout his work, so that one hears a kinship between the Sturm und Drang symphonies of the middle years, the grand public works of his final efforts in the 1790s, and even the earliest, almost incidental music of the first decades of his symphonic output. Perhaps he grew a little more comfortable in his own skin. But even as his later symphonies redefined the form as a kind of grand public spectacle, his earliest forays had already grown past the confines of chamber scale.

I think for the past 20 years the balance between the audience and the composer has shifted decisively in the direction of the "audience friendly," and away from the ivory tower prerogatives that composers enjoyed earlier in the century. To hear Haydn's symphonies, in roughly chronological order, is a remarkable look into a period in which this dichotomy would make no sense to anyone. The audience - that critical link in the chain between musical creativity and musical consumption - begins to feel like an active collaborator in Haydn. Its need to be addressed collectively, challenged, excited, confused and delighted, begins to colour everything in the musical project. Haydn's English audiences feel as palpably present in late Haydn symphonies as Elizabethan groundlings do in Shakespeare, or boisterous claques in the operas of Verdi.

I'm sure a lot of Haydn was performed to rooms full of tedious ninnies - the bores and simpering airheads that Jane Austen would satirise a few years later. Perhaps their voracious need for novelty and entertainment would strike us, if we could go back and make comparisons, as all too similar to that of contemporary movie-goers.

But I hope not. I like to think of Haydn and his audience as a great, symbiotic thing, each nourishing the other. Popularity can destroy an artist and vitiate art. But Haydn's popularity after slipping the confines of his Esterházy employment in the 1790s seems one of the great creative supernovas in history.

The English may have a somewhat checkered reputation when it comes to composers. That dry spell between Purcell and Britten is not the sort of thing you'd want on your CV. But the late symphonies of Haydn, especially those he wrote with London in mind, are proof that while the English have had some bumpy patches with musical composition, they were, at times, some of the best listeners in the world. And Haydn knew how to feed them.