Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was a rare haven of peace during the Thirty Years’ War thanks to its geographical location. Many people, including artists and musicians, fled there from the horrors of plague and war. Heinrich Albert, a pupil of Heinrich Schütz (his cousin) and Johann Hermann Schein, the Thomaskantor in Leipzig, was appointed cathedral organist in the city in 1630. His garden hut, overgrown with pumpkin vines and suitably dubbed the ‘pumpkin hut’ (Kürbishütte), became the meeting place of the Königsberg Circle of Poets: a refuge and a space for cutting-edge creativity, spared from direct involvement in the war. Five musical tableaux, depicting different stages in the war, take the listener on an emotional journey and reflect the everyday emotions people of the period experienced: hope, fear, a longing for peace – but also despair and wrestling with faith in the face of the devastation of war.
The Boreas Quartett Bremen and soprano Dorothee Mields bring a little-known musical manuscript of the renaissance to life and present a series of premiere recordings. The Basevi Codex, a collection of Franco-Flemish chansons, motets and mass settings, was produced during the early sixteenth century in the famous music scribing workshop of Pierre Alamire. Faithfully following renaissance performance practice, which allowed great freedom in its musical realisations, the recorder consort and Dorothee Mields interpret selected pieces from the codex, with voice or purely instrumental, and, depending on the character of the piece, also with improvised virtuoso ornamentation. This creates a colourful picture of the music as it was sung and played at the Burgundian-Dutch court of Princess Margaret of Austria in Mechelen.
The serenata Polifemo opens with an overture for which Bononcini adopts the formal model of the two-part French ouverture in which a slower section with dotted rhythms is followed by a quicker section often involving fugal textures. Bononcini combines his French model with the Italian concerto principle with its multiple choirs of instruments: here the wind ensemble alternates in the quick section with the strings. Although it is in only one act, Polifemo is made up of no fewer than twenty musical numbers: seventeen arias, two duets and one chorus. With a single exception, these numbers are cast in da capo form. Some have no instrumental prelude, whereas eight end with a postlude described as a “ritornello”, with elaborately worked-out parts for the instrumentalists. These postludes presumably allowed preparations to be made for the following action.
Dorothee Oberlinger brought another musical treasure to light last year at the Potsdam Music Festival. "I Portentosi Effetti della madre Natura by Giuseppe Scarlatti had its premiere in the then brand-new Palace Theatre of the New Palace in Sanssouci - with resounding success. Some 250 years later, the work, which stylistically seems to have been written five minutes before Mozart, with a mix of great seria arias and rousing folk echoes, experienced its celebrated resurrection as a production of the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci with the Ensemble 1700 and singers under the artistic direction of Dorothee Oberlinger. The production accompanying the performances will now be released as a world premiere recording on 9 June as a co-production with Musikfestspiele Potsdam and rbb Kultur on the deutsche harmonia mundi label.
Georg Philipp Telemann’s Twelve Fantasias for Solo Flute TWV 40: 2-13 are a rich source of information on the different stylistic forms, emotions and rhetoric conventions employed in Baroque Music. They offer the performer the opportunity to play the operatic, orchestral and chamber-music repertoire of the time on a solo melody instrument.
The 12 Fantasias are especially demanding for the musician and are therefore rarely recorded. Dorothee Oberlinger, as one of the best of her kind, does so with the greatest of ease.
The title Seelen-Music (Soul Music) refers to the first complete collection of all the extant Cantatas by Johann Theile for soprano solo with viol accompaniment, presented here with the recording premieres of Sacred Concertos by Theile’s fellow Northern German Christian Flor and Instrumental Suites by the Gottorf violinist Gregor Zuber. The composer Johann Theile is of great significance in music history inasmuch as he is held to be one of the last pupils of Heinrich Schütz, who was the most important German-language composer of the seventeenth century.
The acclaimed recorder player Dorothee Oberlinger and her ensemble 1700 team up with famous countertenor Andreas Scholl for this inspiring new album featuring the work of J.S. Bach. The album includes arias from Bach cantatas for alto, a concerto for harpsichord arranged for flute, the cantata BWV 170 “Vergnügte Ruh” and the famed Brandenburg concertos No. 2 and No. 4. Dorothee Oberlinger is one of the most amazing discoveries of recent years, an expressive virtuoso who - quite rightly - received numerous awards while still very young.