Concert Review: The Genesis Effect

The Oratorio Society of New York plays Haydn's Creation.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Kent Tritle leading the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall.
Photo by Tim Dwight © 2014 The Oratorio Society of New York. 

Franz Joseph Haydn is a pivotal figure in music. The father of the symphony and the string quartet, Haydn is too often pigeon-holed as a doddering relic, a composer who churned out similar works to keep a rich patron happy and whose music remains irrelevant today. With their season-opening performance of The Creation ("Die Schöpfung") on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, Kent Tritle and the Oratorio Society of New York showed that the truth about Haydn is something very different.