Early in December 1790 the impresario ]ohann Peter Salomon walked into Haydn's rooms inVienna and introduced himself with the now famous words, "I am Salomon of London and have come to fetch you. Tomorrow we will arrange an accord." He had made several previous attempts to lure the great composer to England, but as he well knew the moment was now opportune: Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, Haydn's employer for nearly 30 years, had died iust three months earlier, and one of the first acts of his successor, Prince Paul Anton II, was to disband the musicians of the Esterháza court. Although Haydn was retained on a pension, his position as Kapellmeister became a purely honorary one and he was free to accept employment elsewhere.
After a rough Channel crossing Haydn beheld the white cliffs of Dover for the first time on New Year's Day, 1791. He was in his late fifties at the time,and his European fame surpassed even that of Mozart. His appearance in London was greeted with immense excitement. A few days after reaching the capital he wrote to his old Viennese friend Maria Anna von Genzinger:

My arrival caused a great sensation throughout the whole city, and I was taken around all the newspapers for three days. Everyone is eager to know me. I have already had to dine out six times, and if I wanted I could be invited every day; but first I must consider my health, and 2nd my work... Yesterday I was invited to a grand amateur concert, but I arrived a little late, and when I showed my ticket they wouldn't let me in but led me to an antechamben where I had to wait until the piece which was then being played in the hall was over. Then they opened the doon and I was conducted, on the arm ofthe entrepreneur up the centre of the hall to the front of the orchestra, amid general applause, and there I was stared at and greeted by a great number of English compliments. They assured me that such an honour had not been conferred on anyone for 50 years.

Haydn gave his first concert at the Hanover Square Rooms on 11 March 1791. We cannot be sure as to which of his symphonies he performed on that occasion, but it is likely to have been No. 92 - the one known as the "Oxford". It was not a new work (though it was new to England) and Haydn had actually composed it not for London, but for Paris. In 1784 he had been approached by a Masonic concert society called Le Concert de la Loge olympique, with a commission to write a set of six new symphonies. The chief instigator of the commission was one of the society's backers, Claude-François-Marie Rigoley, Comte d'Ogny. Haydn completed two of the symphonies, Nos.83 and 87, and possibly a third (No.85), in 1785; and the remaining three - Nos. 82, 84 and 86 - the following year. The success of these 'Paris' symphonies was such that the Comte d'Ogny was able to commission a further three symphonies from Haydn some two years later. These were Nos. 90-92, and it was the last in this group that Haydn chose to have performed when he was presented with his honorary doctorate at the University of Oxford, on 8 July 1791 - hence the nickname by which it has been known ever since.
According to Albert Christian Dies,whose early Haydn biography was based on conversations with the composer, it was the famous music historian Charles Burney who was the motivating force behind Haydn's degree:

He talked Haydn into taking this step, and travelled with him to Oxford. At the ceremony in the University Hall a speech encouraged the assembled company to honour the merits of a man who had risen so high in the service of music by presenting him with the doctor's hat. The whole company was loud in Haydn's praise, whereupon Haydn was dressed in a white silk gown with sleeves of red silk, a small black hat of black silk was placed on his head, and thus clothed he had to sit on a doctor’s chair. After this ceremony came music, in which our [Gertrud] Mara, who was in England at the time, sang. Haydn was asked to perform something of his own composition. He climbed up to the organ loft, turned to face the assembled company whose eyes were all directed towards him, grasped his doctor's robe with both hands, opened it, closed it again and said as loudly and clearly as he could: "I thank you." The company well understood this unexpected gesture; they appreciated Haydn 's thanks and answered: "You speak very good english."
 "I felt very comical in this gown" [Haydn told me]; "and the worst thing was that for three whole days I had to go around the streets dressed up like this. All the same, I owe much to this doctor’s degree in England - indeed, I could say I owe it everything. Thanks to it I got to know the most important men and gained entrance to the greatest houses."

Haydn's choice of symphony to have performed on this occasion was a happy one: it is one of his most sparkling and witty works of its kind,and one that wears its considerable learning lightly. It is scored for a large orchestra,using its trumpets and drums even in the slow movemnent, where their sudden eruption in the D minor middle section lends the music weight and drama. This imposing moment, which contrasts so strongly with the gentle lyricism ofthe remainder of the piece, seems to offer a foretaste of the D minor turbulence Haydn invoked so memorably in his Nelson Mass nearly a decade later. The Adagio also contains, both in its middle section and in its closing pages, striking passages scored for the wind instruments alone.
Altogether, Haydn's ear for orchestral colour in this work is remarkable. The trio of the minuet has hunting-calls with strong off-beat accents for horns and bassoons, accompanied by pizzicato strings and punctuated by smooth ascending and descending scales on the arco violins. When the horn-calls return during the trio's closing bars, they are made to, overlap with the scale figures, before both ideas invade the entire orchestra. As for the minuet itself, its second half sets off with a dramatic plunge into the minor, followed by an abrupt moment of silence - as though the music has been stopped dead in its tracks. The effect is the more striking when the piece is taken at a relatively swift tempo, as in the performance recorded here.
There are more stops and starts in the opening bars of the finale's powerfully canonic central development section,where the movement's bubbling main theme is transformed into something altogether darker and more dramatic. As presented at the outset, the theme is given out in a skeletal form by the first violins, accompanied by nothing more than a ‘rocking' octave on the cellos. The theme's restatement passes to the flute an octave higher, with the rapid 'tick-tock' accompaniment transferred to an agile horn player; and the same motion, this time a little more fully scored, also features in the altogether skittish second subject. (When the second subject resurfaces in the recapitulation the horn player once more finds himself called upon to join in the playful accompaniment.)
The variety of Haydn's orchestral palette is manifested right at the symphony's outset, where the main bulk of the slow introduction is scored for strings alone, with the eventual entry of the wind instruments coinciding with a darkening of the music's mood. The introduction's closing bars are left un resolved,and the quiet main theme of the Allegro begins as though in mid-stream - a feature Haydn maintains each time the theme returns during the course of the movement. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the Allegro is the manner in which the music's intensity and instability are continued in the recapitulation, in such a manner that the music appears to progress in a single uninterrupted sweep from the start of the development section right until the end ofthe coda.
The cantata Arianna a Naxos was probably composed in 1789, but it achieved its greatest success in Haydn's London concert season two years later. It was the composer's own favourite among his works of its kind (though his judgement was made before he had written the Scena di Berenice) and the first of its two arias was later much admired by Rossini.
On 18 February 1791 Haydn played the piano part of Arianna a Naxos for a performance of the work with the famous castrato Gasparo Pacchiarotti at one of the "Ladies’ Concerts" given in the Portland Place rooms of the prominent London music patron Mrs Blair. The occasion prompted the Morning Chronicle to report:

The musical world is at this moment enraptured with a Composition which Haydn has brought forth, and which has produced effects bordering on all that Poets used to sing of the ancient lyre. Nothing is tallied of - nothing sought after but Haydn’s Cantata - or, as it is called in the Italian School - his Scena... It abounds with such a variety of dramatic modulations - and is so exquisitely captivating in its larmoyant passages, that it touched and dissolved the audience. They speak of it with rapturous recollection, and Haydn's Cantata will accordingly be the musical desideratum for the winter.

Such was the cantata's success that it was repeated at a concert held in the Pantheon (the opera house supported by King George III) the following week. This time the Morning Chronicle was moved to comment: "The modulation is so deep and scientific, so varied and agitating - that the company was thrown into extasies. Every fibre was touched by the captivating energies of the passion..."
The story of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, and despairing to the point of madness before being comforted by Dionysus (or Bacchus), whom she subsequently marries, is one that inspired composers from Monteverdi to Strauss. Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, the sole surviving portion of his opera on the same subject, was one of his most celebrated compositions for its power to stir the emotions.
Haydn sets his anonymous text in the form of two extended recitatives, each followed by a slow aria. The opening instrumental passage portrays Ariadne's awakening from sleep, while the first of the two arias is perhaps the closest Haydn ever came to a Mozartian operatic style (notice, for instance, the halting phrases that set the words 'né resisto al mio dolor'). The aria ends with an anticipation of the echo effect which in the following recitative depicts the only reply Ariadne receives to the words she addresses to Theseus.
The second recitative contains a remarkable series of chromatically ascending chords, as Ariadne climbs a rock in order to search the horizon for a sign of Theseus. Her deliriousness at the realisation that he has abandoned her is accompanied by a striking change of key, as the music seems momentarily to lose all sense of direction. Also graphically depicted are the wind and the waves that carry Theseus away from her forever, and -in a sustained passage of syncopation - the faltering of her steps as she almost loses consciousness.
As for the final aria, it concludes with a 'presto' in a dark F minor - a key which frequently finds Haydn in his most dramatic and agitated vein. The closing bars - an intense chromatic ascent followed by a peremptory cadence - have a smouldering intensity that is rare in Haydn's music of the period, and the wholly unexpected turn from minor to major for the very last chord seems only to underline Ariadne's manic despair.
Haydn wrote his cantata for voice and piano.He may well have intended to orchestrate it himself, though he never actually did so, and the version we hear on the present DVD, which has the singer  strings, is one of several arrangements of the piece made during the early years of the nineteenth century.
Haydn's final concert season in London took place between February and May 1795. On 4 May at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket he presented a programme that included the premiere of his last symphony, No.104 (knonn as the "London") as well as a new dramatic orchestral scena composed for the famous Brigida Giorgi Banti, the King's Theatre's principal resident soprano. Banti had arrived in England the previous year, and opinions as to her musical talents differed widely. The General Evening Post reviewed her London debut in April 1795 in glowing terms:

The musical world were gratifed on Saturday evening by the first appearance of the BANTI, and it is but justice to say, that her performance was worthy of her fame. Her first bravura song generally electrified the audience; in the succeeding efforts she shewed that her powers in the Cantabile are equally transcendent. To these, she adds a degree of intelligence and attention to the business of the scene, which interested every careful Auditor in her success.

A handbill for Haydn's concert of 4 May has survived with marginal annotations written by a member of the audience on that historic occasion. The new scena elicited the comment: "Banti has a clear, sweet, equable voice, her low & high notes equally good. Her recitative admirably expressive. Her voice rather wants fullness of tone; her shake is weak and imperfect".
Banti's thin tone was rather more vividly described by Haydn himself. In his notebook he remarked, in his own brand of pidgin-English, "She song very scanty". Despite any such musical shortcomings, however, the composer was well satisfied with the financial side of the evening's work: "The whole company was thoroughly pleased, and so was I. I made four thousand Gulden on this evening. Such a thing is only possible in England."
The Scena di Berenice was one of Haydn's very few works which Beethoven took as a direct model: his concert aria Ah! Perfido of 1796 is patently influenced by it; and it is interesting to note that Haydn's scena was one of the works included in a concert given in Vienna on 22 September 1803, when the singer was Anna Milder - Beethoven's first Leonore. For this concert at the Augarten, Haydn made some minor adjustments to his score, the most significant of which was to omit the quiet opening bars featuring the wind instruments. It has been suggested that the composer was concerned lest his subdued beginning be lost in the chatter of the Viennese audience, though he may have felt it better in any case to start the work in media res, with the impetuous string passage that immediately establishes Berenice's agitated frame of mind. Be that as it may, the present performance restores the original version.
The text of the scena is taken from Metastasio's Antigono. Its subject and musical treatment are remarkably similar to those of Arianna a Naxos,and once again Haydn provides a concluding aria in a dark F minor. Just as the abandoned Ariadne's despair turns to madness, so Berenice struggles to come to terms with her lonely fate following the fatal wounding of her lover, Demetrio. She begs him not to cross the river Lethe without her, and implores God to increase her suffering so that death will claim her.
Berenice’s train of thought in the opening recitative is vividly conveyed by the music: a staccato string passage to illustrate her vacillating steps, tremolos for the icy shiver that passes through her veins, an excursion into the murky depths of C flat major as the day darkens around her; but above all, Berenice's confusion is paralleled by the wide-ranging tonal plan of the piece as a whole.The initial recitative passes through a C major arioso ('Aspetta, anima bella'), before we eventually reach a radiant E maior for a short and remarkably beautiful aria in Handelian style, 'Non partin bel idol mio', whose dream-like quality is heightened not only by the remoteness of its key, but also by the fact that it appears as a single moment of serene calm between the dramatic opening recitative and the scorchingly intense closing number. The aria is cruelly broken off, with an extraordinarily bold
enharmonic change that takes the music at one fell swoop into the very distant key of E flat. (At the point where the violins’ D sharps are transmuted into their aural equivalent, E flat, Haydn made his intentions clear by writing the words "N.B. the Same Tone" above the violin part, much as he was to do on several future occasions involving complex notational key-switches of this kind.)
As for the concluding aria,it is a wildly despairing Allegro in F minor in which Haydn enriches his orchestral palette by introducing the sound of clarinets, while allowing the soprano part to spread itself spectacularly over a range of two octaves, to reach high C at the final words, 'l'ecesso del dolor' ('excess of grief'). Haydn had used clarinets for the first time in his Symphony No.99, of 1793, to add warmth to the music’s sonority. In the cantata their presence lends pungency to the expression of a state of mind bordering on madness.Very few of Haydn's minor-mode works of the 1790s actually retain the intensity of the minor right up to the bitter end. In this case, though, as in the great F sharp minor Piano trio composed around the same time, there is no question of offering a placatory resolution in the major, and the music maintains its bleak atmosphere until the very last bar.