Concentus Musicus Wien / Arnold Schoenberg Choir / Harnoncourt, Royal Festival Hall, London

Creation theory and practice

It is, astonishingly, 50 years since a young Austrian cellist called Nikolaus Harnoncourt first set up his Concentus Musicus Wien to explore the possibilities of period-instrument performance. Ever since then, he has not only continued to lead the early music movement in fresh and sometimes surprising directions, but has emerged as one of the most genuinely recreative conductors of the standard repertoire on the international circuit. And the work that Concentus Musicus brought to the Royal Festival Hall as part of its current 50th anniversary European tour proved particularly apt to Harnoncourt's speculative musicality.

First performed in 1799, on the cusp, as it were, of the Englightenment and the Romanticism, Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) looks back as well as forward. Baron von Swieten's German libretto was founded in an English Augustan text with its roots in Milton, and Haydn is known to have been inspired by grandiose performances of Handel that he heard in London. Doubtless, that is partly why "authentic" performances in this country have tended towards the neatly rococo in the arias and the brazenly baroque in the fugal choruses. But from the entry of the 28 Concentus Musicus strings, with the merest breath of sound, in Haydn's astonishing preludial "Representation of Chaos", it was clear that we were in for something very different.

It was not just that the tone of everything seemed so much warmer and more rounded than we are used to – the singing of the 40-strong Schoenberg Choir as much as the orchestra. These are Austrian musicians, after all. Nor that Harnoncourt unduly muted the grander moments, such as the climax of "The Heavens are telling", which Beethoven ripped off so shamelessly in his Second Symphony. But the bias was consistently towards proto-Romantic sentiment, with much flexibility of tempo and a treatment of cadences like "Amens". Much of the solo singing, particularly from the lyric tenor Herbert Lippert, had a lieder-like ease, so that the Adam and Eve pastoral of Part Three came over as a high point rather than the falling-away after the excitement of Creation that it can sometimes seem.

What Harnoncourt seemed to be after, in short, was not so much recreating the composer's intention, as recreating the way in which the work was performed, understood and loved in the decades immediately following its triumphant premiere. No doubt it is as much a tribute to his profound musicality as to his historical imagination that one felt that if Schubert had ever directed a performance of The Creation in the 1820s, this was how it would have sounded.