Haydn gets a celestial rendition

Kristian Bezuidenhout (pictured Oct. 7) played and conducted.

Kristian Bezuidenhout and the Collegium Vocale Gent might have performed together for 20 years, so perfectly in synch were they in Saturday's all-Haydn concert in the Boston Early Music Festival. In fact, they have toured once in Europe, and were giving only their second concert together in the United States, following by a day the first, the same program at the Library of Congress.

Yet the young superstar fortepianist and 12 singers of the Belgian choral ensemble seemed to have the same impulse, musically speaking, at every moment. After a while, I began to wish one of Bezuidenhout's piano strings would break, or a singer would sneeze, just to remind us we live in a sublunary world.

Honoring the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death, the program combined four keyboard pieces with several part-songs and two expressive and not often heard solo songs. At strategic points, British radio personality Rhod Sharp impersonated Papa Haydn in a series of dramatic readings that drew on the composer's letters.

The Collegium Vocale Gent is one of the great small choruses in the world, and is well known for its many recordings with music director Philippe Herreweghe. Their beautifully blended, balanced sound is a magnificent thing, and the "Abendlied zu Gott," a masterpiece of simple piety that combines long cantilena with fast runs, was sung very beautifully. (It was repeated as an encore.) One could argue that these songs should be sung with one voice on a part and with the slightly rough quality they would have had with amateur singers. Haydn is an earth-loving rather than an otherworldly composer, and his "Alles hat seine Zeit," for example, which begins "Live, love, drink, carouse!" does not gain anything by being sung as if it were religious music.

Bezuidenhout is a 29-year-old South African pianist much loved at the festival. He exudes music from every pore even when he's bowing and he brought his special electricity to two Sonatas (No. 32 and 58), a set of Variations in F minor (a bit long, this), and, finally, the "Consummatum est," from Haydn's keyboard arrangement of "The Seven Last Words of Christ." Bezuidenhout is a romantic, playing with exciting attacks, graceful phrasing, constant shifts of color, and long, long pauses at the end of cadences that always seem just right.

The First Churches, Congregational, is kinder on choruses indeed, it makes 12 voices sound like 30 but it swallows up some of the sound of the fortepiano and the spoken voice. A narrative can be a fun and helpful device. Sharp's spoken pieces (written by an unidentified Belgian broadcaster) were long and didn't always make a clear point; selections from the letters would have sufficed.