During his lifetime, Franz Joseph Haydn cut a fatherly figure, earning the devotion of Mozart and the adulation of the emerging classical-music world. Two hundred years after his death, the world still affectionately calls him Papa in homage to the genius who fathered the symphony and the string quartet. In celebration of Haydn's 200th anniversary, Brilliant Classics has compiled this 150-CD box set (a companion to recent exhaustive collections of Mozart and Bach works), featuring the complete symphonies; the complete violin concertos; the complete cello concertos; the complete piano and baryton trios; and scads of string quartets, violin sonatas, and works for lute and strings; as well as operas, folk songs, liturgical pieces, and other sundry. Performers include the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (under Neville Mariner), the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra (under Adam Fisher), the Hungarian State Orchestra (under Ferenc Szekeres), the Buchberger Quartet, the Van Sweiten Trio (on period instruments), Duo Ongarese, the Esterhazy Ensemble (on viols), the Drottingham Baroque Ensemble, and the fine Haydn Trio Eisenstadt, among others. This recession-busting, budget-priced anthology, replete with a bonus CD-ROM of the biography Joseph Haydn: Craftsman and Genius, is a terrific survey of the works of one of the pivotal figures in classical music.

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