In 1722, Christoph Graupner missed being appointed as the new cantor of St Thomas' Church in Leipzig by a hair and not Johann Sebastian Bach. But Graupner's employer, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, refused to let him go. He knew exactly what a talented court conductor he had obtained around ten years prior. He was skilful at composing operas, cantatas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music and piano works and was therefore worth every penny of his handsome salary. Graupner imaginatively filled even small sacred works with life, producing great expression in even the most modest instrumentation using subtle voice leading. This is what we hear in these works, which are performed just as "agilely, nimbly and often with joyful and declamatory vigour" (Klassik-Heute) as the first recording of these so-called "Dialogue Cantatas".

This is an album that portrays an imaginary weird audition that took place in Leipzig in 1723. After Johann Kuhnau's death the Thomaskirche was in search of a new Kantor. For different reasons Telemann, Fasch and Graupner declined and the fourth choice happened to be Johann Sebastian Bach. Thomas Triesschijn and his ensemble imagine a dialogue among the four giants through their own compositions for recorder and orchestra. This recording is not only a showcase for a great virtuoso, but a fully enjoyable album with plenty of wonderful music. Triesschijn and Counterpoint previous (and first) release was awarded the Gramophone Editor's Choice: "This debut album is, hands down, some of the best recorded Telemann out there, and I am ready to go fist to fist with anyone who disagrees."

The Finnish Baroque Orchestra’s second release of Christoph Graupner’s (1683–1760) music continues to reveal delightful masterpieces by this famed-in-his-day Baroque master. + Possessing a unique personal style of writing music and often favoring certain rarer instruments in his works, Graupner’s immense catalogue contains over 2,000 works varying from orchestral works to cantatas, concertos and chamber music. + The FBO plays music from the 17th c. to the early Romantic era. It also seeks novel perspectives on early instruments by performing new music on Baroque instruments.

Compared with his more than 1,400 cantatas, operas, and other vocal works, his instrumental works account for only a small portion of his oeuvre, but they demonstrate that, like Telemann, Graupner was a late baroque composer who always lived in quest of new expressive possibilities. The concertos presented here, composed in 1736-37 and 1742, were used either as table music pieces or for concert events.

The fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was able to take up the post of the cantor of St. Thomas in 1723 is thanks to the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. He refused to release his court Kapellmeister Christoph Graupner to Leipzig. He declared the appointment of the magistrate there to be invalid and increased the salary of his subordinate. In this way, he was able to long admire the diversity of the man who wrote outstanding works in all areas of composition. For example, in orchestral music, he sought out unusual experiments with unique results by combining seemingly disparate instruments and ignoring formal conventions. Would he have been as successful with the honourable councillors on the river Pleisse as he was under the aegis of his aristocratic employer? After hearing a two-and-a-half-hour selection of Graupner's works, we must thank His Excellency for not letting him go three hundred years ago

Music historians of our time invariably describe the early 18th century as the era of Johann Sebastian Bach. But if one were to have asked German musicians living at the time, they might well have described it as the era of Georg Philipp Telemann. The distinguished music encyclopedia published by Johann Gottfried Walther - J.S. Bach's cousin, as it happens - in 1732 devotes four times more space to the fashionable maestro of Hamburg than to the humble Thomaskantor.

Graupner's total surviving output comprises some 2,000 separate works, including ten operas, a hundred symphonies, a thousand cantatas, 85 orchestral suites and 44 concertos. A significant part of his orchestral output consists of concertos and suites with diverse, sometimes very curious instruments in the solo ensembles.

Among the rarer solo instruments he favoured were the flûte d'amour, a flute pitched a third lower than the normal transverse flute, and the viola d'amore, an instrument roughly the same size and shape as a viola but with resonating free strings in addition to the (usually) seven strings played with the bow. Combining the traverso and hunting horn in the same concerto, or the viola d'amore and the chalumeau, was extremely exceptional for the period.

What is significant in Graupner's music is his exceptional command of melody and harmony, which do not really resemble those of any of his contemporaries.