The hell is a “Lira Concerto”?

See? Right from the start, I need to learn something.

I love that.

Before I get my Google fingers Googling, I’m listening. And what I’m hearing sounds like a calliope. Some kind of circus instrument that, to my ears, sounds like it should be attached to a wagon that sells cotton candy from town to town — with P.T. Barnum out front cajoling people to “Come one! Come all! Step right up!”

Okay. Now it’s time to discover what a Lira Concerto is.

The CD jacket tells me the following:

Hugo Ruf lira
Susanne Lautenbacher, Ruth Nielen violins
Franz Beyer, Heinz Berndt violas
Oswald Uhl, cello * Johannes Koch viola da gamba
Wolfgang Hoffman & Helmuth Irmscher horns

So, apparently, there actually is something called a lira that one plays. It’s an instrument.

Google time.

I see. The lira “is a Ukrainian variant of the hurdy-gurdy, an instrument which can trace its history back to the 10th century.” What I’m hearing doesn’t sound like a hurdy-gurdy.

I’ve seen one of those (a hurdy-gurdy). In fact, I’ve seen someone play one in a Swiss folk-metal band called Eluveitie (“El-way-tee”).

One of the musicians in Eluveitie plays a hurdy-gurdy. You can see and hear it in this video. (NOTE: This music is not for the faint of heart. Folk metal is a combination of folk music and death metal, particularly in the growly vocals.)

The lira doesn’t exactly sound like a hurdy-gurdy to my ears. It sounds more like a wind instrument. But, obviously, I’m wrong. The drawing of the lira above resembles a hurdy-gurdy, not a calliope.

But it sounds so circus-like!

The compositions on today’s CD are:

Lira Concerto In C HOB VIIH:1 (1786 – Haydn was 54 years old)

Lira Concerto in F HOB VIIH:5 (1786)

Lira Concerto in G HOB VIIH:3 (1786)

Lira Concerto in F HOB VIIH:4 (1786)

Lira Concerto in G HOB VIIH:2 (1786)

That’s a whole lotta lira, if you ask me. (I realize you didn’t ask me. But I’m learning to be more proactive these days.)

Here is Haydn’s Lira Concerto in C HOB VIIH:1, the exact performance to which I am listening this morning.

All of the Lira concerts sound about the same to me. So I won’t find YouTube videos for all of them. You get the idea.

According to the Wikipedia list of Haydn’s concerts,

These concertos were written for Ferdinand IV, King of Naples whose favorite instrument was the lira organizzata — an instrument similar to the hurdy gurdy. Modern performances use flute and oboe (or two flutes) as the soloists.

King Ferdinand liked the lira, eh?

He’s a better man than I.

It’s not that I don’t like these compositions. I think they’re novel. And that’s the problem. They sound more like a novelty than a serious concerto. I can listen to a few of them, or one of them all the way through. But then their novelty wears off.