The recent discovery of Telemann's Fantasias for viola da gamba solo has inspired many musicians to study and perform these masterpieces. Rainer Zipperling and his friends Saskia Coolen (recorder) and the newly appointed musical director of the Netherlands Bach Society Shunske Sato (violin) decided to release an extensive 3-album set containing all the solo Fantasias Telemann wrote for their instruments. This release is a hand numbered limited edition of 1000 copies. Rainer Zipperling studied viola da gamba and cello at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Finishing his studies in 1980 he joined groups such as the Orchestra of the 18th century, La Petite Bande, the Ricercar Consort and Camerata K�ln. Today he is highly regarded as a teacher at the Cologne Conservatory of Music and Dance and the Lemmensinstitut in Leuven, Belgium. Saskia Coolen studied the recorder with Kees Boeke and Walter van Hauwe at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, as well as musicology at the University of Utrecht. For many years, she has been a member of La Fontegara and Camerata Trajectina, which have given numerous concerts at home and abroad. Shunske Sato is a violinist known for his distinctive and engaging performances on both modern and historical instruments. Equally in demand as concertmaster, chamber musician, soloist and teacher, the diversity of his activities reflect his versatile and resourceful nature.

PENTATONE presents Telemann’s rarely-performed opera Miriways (1728) with a stellar cast and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Bernard Labadie. Star vocalists such as Andre Morsch (Miriways), Robin Johannsen (Sophi), Sophie Karthäuser (Bemira), Lydia Teuscher (Nisibis) and Michael Nagy (Murzah) offer a string of beautiful baroque arias and scenes in this German-language opera. Miriways is a piece about love, duty and truthfulness, and was based on recent political events in Afghanistan and Persia that actually made headlines in European newspapers, demonstrating the eighteenth-century fascination for the Orient. The opera was recorded live during the Telemann Festival Hamburg in 2017. The Akademie für Alte Musik is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial PENTATONE discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), as well as Handel’s Concerti grossi op. 6 (released in 2019 and 2020). Robin Johannsen featured on Handel’s Parnasso in festa (2017). Andre Morsch, Sophie Karthäuser, Lydia Teuscher, Michael Nagy and Bernard Labadie make their PENTATONE debut.

No eighteenth-century composer was so adept at so many musical styles as Georg Philipp Telemann. Telemann's versatility and inventiveness kept his musical style avant-garde during his entire life. He was not only praised by his contemporaries but was highly respected by the next generation: his fame was immense. Therefore New Collegium, one of the promising ensembles of the younger generation, has chosen for their first album on the Ramée label to show Telemann the chameleon, the breadth of his musical palette. Some of the pieces will undoubtedly sound familiar; others, such as the Italianate Trio for violin and cello obbligato, or the pastoral Trio for two violins in scordatura, will surely be delightful, new surprises for many. Coming in and out of disguise with Telemann’s chameleonic notes we often find ourselves wondering: is this truly music by just one composer, not six?

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) gained fame over much of Europe during the middle of his own life for his gallant and mixed style. In 1726, learned poet Christian Friedrich Weichmann (1698–1770) compared him to the greatest musicians in Venice, Rome, Paris and London (Poesieder Nieder-Sachsen, part 3) and he was to receive increasing acclaim over the next 10 years. In 1740, influential music writer Johann Mattheson asserted in his Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte that Telemann had even eclipsed the two pioneers of the era, Lully (French style) and Corelli (Italian style). Colorful instrumentation is a feature of Telemann’s oeuvre and this can especially be heard in his cantatas, operas and orchestral suites, or in his original configurations such as the Concertos for Four Violins without orchestra. Another typical feature of his work, and one which strongly appeals to musicians such as Caroline Eidsten Dahl, is his ability to compose idiomatically. This is hardly surprising, as according to his autobiographical texts, he played harpsichord, lute, violin and recorder during his childhood, and then later learned basic skills on the oboe, the transverse flute, the viola da gamba, double bass and the trombone. This is a fantastic performance of Caroline Eidsten Dahl on recorder alongside Kate Hearne on Baroque Cello and Christian Kjos on Harpsichord.

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Baroque master Telemann set the St. Luke Passion in 11 different versions. He did so because he composed for 5 of Hamburg’s principal churches and had the task of setting the passion narrative from the Gospel of Luke in alternation with those in Matthew, Mark, and John at regular y year intervals. He did not want to repeat himself in this performance series.

TELEMANN Violin Concertos: in C, TWV 51:C3 ; in g, TWV 51:g1; in b, TWV 51:h2 ; in G, TWV 51:G7 ; in a, TWV 51:a2 ; in B?, TWV 51:B1 ; in A, TWV 51:A4 • Elizabeth Wallfisch (vn), dir; L’Orfeo Barockorchester (period instruments) • cpo 777089 (64:21)


This is the second of what promises to be a three-CD set including all Telemann’s violin concertos, a body of works (21 in all, according to the revised New Grove ) rather less daunting in number than is the case with many areas of Telemann’s output. Equally, the concertos themselves are not especially daunting to a performer, since they adhere to the composer’s own philosophy and his professed dislike of ostentatious virtuosity. Those interested will find Robert Maxham’s review of the earlier volume in Fanfare 28:1; I reviewed it elsewhere, finding the performances of Elizabeth Wallfisch and the L’Orfeo players well nigh ideal.


As with the first disc, the remarkable thing is the sheer variety Telemann introduced into concerto form. That range includes his interest in the Corellian type of concerto, as is the case with the B-Minor Concerto, with its four brief movements, although Telemann springs a surprise in the last of these by reverting to a lively dance in the typical Polish style he made very much his own. The Concerto in C, on the other hand, is a thoroughly modern Italian concerto that also includes elements of the sinfonia. It was in fact composed as the overture to the opera Der neumodische Leibhaber Damon (Hamburg, 1724), the first of its three movements having a Vivaldian drive and energy, the second a transitory passage, while the third is an elegant minuet in which the soloist is featured only in two episodes. After opening with an innocent, song-like Andante, the G-Major Concerto maintains a bucolic dance spirit throughout, the exception being the third of its four movements, a hauntingly lovely siciliana that hovers enigmatically between major and minor modes.


The really outstanding concerto here is TWV 51:B1 in B?, a work written for the Dresden concertmaster Johann Georg Pisendel, while the most original is the A-Major, TWV 51:A4. The former, another four-movement work, was for long known in an incomplete state, part of the MS of the final movement being missing. Its opening movement displays Telemann’s contrapuntal mastery and adaptation of ritornello form to a degree of formal sophistication rarely found in contemporary Italian concertos, with fragments of the ritornello worked into exchanges with the solo part. At the heart of the concerto is an exquisite Andante in which the soloist’s aria-like cantilena is supported by a gently throbbing accompaniment. The A Major is one of the more familiar of Telemann’s violin concertos, a descriptive work sometimes known as “Die Relinge,” a kind of tree frog. In the opening movement, the soloist is called on to imitate the call of the creatures with tremolandos close to the instrument’s bridge, while the central Largo is a beautiful evocation of drowsy, soft song in the stillness of a warm summer’s evening. A gracious Minuet finale (with a string trio central episode) returns to the formal world of man.


The performances again seem to me near ideal, with tempos that simply sound unerringly right, and the spirit of the music captured with impeccably idiomatic style. These may for the most part not be flashy concertos, but they demand a considerable level of technical skill and agility from their performer, in addition to an ability to draw pure, unmannered cantabile lines. On both counts it would be difficult to fault the experienced Wallfisch, who is again admirably supported by the L’Orfeo Barockorchester, one of the most improved ensembles in the field. Given that when complete this will stand alone as a complete set of the violin concertos, alternative versions are not really relevant. In any event, several of the concertos are otherwise unavailable, making this brightly engineered disc and its predecessor obligatory for all Telemann collectors; it also makes for a highly desirable acquisition by anyone else.


FANFARE: Brian Robins

Classical Music

American Record Guide raves "...These are state-of-the-art early-music performances, German style, with a good deal of technical polish and energy....The soloists are admirable, especially bass Klaus Mertens....Tenor Andreas Post has a light, reedy sound that is well suited to the idiom."

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Includes cantata(s) by Georg Philipp Telemann. Ensembles: Rheinische Kantorei, Das Kleine Konzert. Conductor: Hermann Max. Soloists: Veronika Winter, Lena Susanne Norin, Jan Kobow, Ekkehard Abele, Ingrid Schmithüsen, Claudia Schubert, Howard Crook, Gotthold Schwarz.

If you're up for nearly 160 minutes of quintessentially charming German baroque chamber music, here is the set for you. The Camerata Köln lucidly performs Telemann's six concertos and suites with as much style and invention as we're ever likely to hear. These players clearly understand how Telemann's inventive variety of dance forms, sudden chromatic harmonic shifts, and parallel note sequences reflect his awareness of national styles outside of Germany. They also tactfully embrace the improvisatory freedom Telemann encouraged. If you've enjoyed Telemann's more well known (and recorded) Paris Quartets or Methodic Sonatas, or his famous Tafelmusik series, you'll likely enjoy these debut performances as well. CPO's presentation, notes, and sound are, as usual, impeccable. A must for Telemann completists (and good luck to them!). Others may not need too much of a good thing. --John Greene, ClassicsToday.com

These cantatas are all products of Telemann’s prodigious final years, dating from 1759 in the case of the first and third, while the second listed was composed in 1762, the year in which the grand old man reached the age of 81. The cantata for Pentecost, Komm Geist des Herrn, is a large-scale work lavishly scored for three trumpets, timpani, two oboes, and strings. The vocal disposition is the usual SATB soloists and choir (in Telemann’s own performances probably one and the same, as with Bach). The cantata is centered round a chorale parody of Luther’s hymn Komm heilger Geist by one of Telemann’s favorite poets, Friedrich Klopstock. This striking example of Telemann’s modernity apparently upset the most conservative of Hamburg’s pastors, whose complaints to the city council sparked off a row in which the composer vigorously defended himself against orders to reinstate Luther’s original text. Anyone reading Klopstock’s fine verse today will wonder what the fuss was about, but the story provides a salutary reminder that clashes between conservatism and “progress” are nothing new. The predominantly joyous character of the cantata is immediately set by the invigorating opening trumpet and drum aria for bass (sung by Ekkehard Abele with resounding authority), its dynamic further enhanced by the thrusting little ornamental figures in the strings. But perhaps the most impressive movement is an accompagnato for tenor, a vivid description of Christ’s spirit manifested in the sudden swirling wind, depicted first by furious scales, then by more gentle rustling figuration. This, along with other imitative effects, is Telemann as the forerunner of the Haydn of The Creation and The Seasons.

Kaum wag ich es is a considerably more modest work, designated simply “church music” and intended for the 19th Sunday after Trinity. Scored for the same vocal forces as Komm Geist, the orchestration calls for only strings. The text is an ode, Die Begnadigung (“The Pardon”), by Joachim Eschenburg, one of the younger poets encouraged by Telemann. It takes as its theme the dark night of the sinner’s soul redeemed by God’s forgiveness, thus being linked to the Epistle for the day (Ephesians 4:17-32), a detail that might have been mentioned by the otherwise profuse booklet notes. Telemann set all six stanzas, treating the first and last as chorales framing short, through-composed arias. The arias chart a progress from the pain of sin (alto), underpinned by an accompaniment of sliding chromatic strings and sharply etched stabbing figures, through remorse, a cantabile aria for tenor supported by expressive string arpeggiations, agitation at the approach of Christ (soprano), and finally to the forgiving words of Jesus.

The final “cantata”—scored for the same forces as the Pentecost cantata with the addition of a pair of flutes—has a text by another young Hamburg poet, Daniel Schiebeler, and is also described as Kirchemusik. Er kam, lobsingt ihm; it follows a similar format to the preceding work, an ode with six stanzas, all but the last of which is a solo. The text for Ascension Day is not only concerned with the risen Christ but also is a retrospective comment on His suffering in death. As in Kaum wag ich es, the care with which Telemann sets this vividly descriptive text is remarkable, achieving in the process a synthesis between words and music of a kind for which one has to look back to the 17th century for models.

Little comment is needed at this late stage on Ludger Rémy’s unfailingly stylish and idiomatic way with Telemann’s music, except to say the alto Elisabeth Graf’s unusually masculine sounding alto is less to my taste than the other soloists, all familiar Rémy regulars. Her diction, too, seems less incisive than that of her colleagues. The engineering is well in line with cpo’s usual high standards, but the poor playing time earns a black mark. The radical manner in which Telemann carried the church cantata forward after Bach’s death is an aspect of his music still scarcely recognized. This outstanding release sheds revealing light on the subject.

FANFARE: Brian Robins

Classical Music