Oberlinger

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.

Die Blockflötistin Dorothee Oberlinger gilt mittlerweile als »Star im Bereich der Alten Musik« (rbb). Für ihre erste CD bei dhm – »Italian Sonatas« – wurde sie mit dem Echo Klassik 2008 als »Instrumentalistin des Jahres« ausgezeichnet. Nach der letztjährigen hochgelobten Produktion mit Werken von Telemann erscheint nun ihre neue CD mit deutschen Blockflötenkonzerten des Barock. Mit dem Ensemble 1700 unter der Leitung von Reinhard Goebel spielt sie ein neu entdecktes Konzert, das Georg Philipp Telemann zugeschrieben wird, eine festliche Suite des Darmstädter Telemann-Kollegen Christoph Graupner und ein Konzert des wenig bekannten Berliner Komponisten Johann Christoph Schultze, das auf der Schwelle zur Frühklassik komponiert wurde.

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.

In its way, this German release is more radical than many of the other discs on which recorder players have asserted their rights to big swaths of the Baroque repertory. The radical quality doesn't lie in the arrangement of Bach works for the recorder, which in no way goes beyond Bach's own musical recycling ethic. (Three works were originally written for flute, one was an organ trio sonata, one was a violin sonata, and one is for harpsichord alone.) The unusual quality of the arrangement instead lies in the treatment of the accompanimental harpsichord, which is all alone with no gamba or anything else supporting its fundamental line.

This milestone of the Arcana catalogue returns with new artwork, new catalogue number (previously A330) and a new cover featuring ‘Boy with Flute’ by the Venetian painter Domenico Maggiotto. All the recorder concertos on this CD were written expressly for flauto or flautino and show the imagination, delicacy, freshness, virtuosity and sometimes even melancholy, which Vivaldi put into his writing for this instrument. Oberlinger has intentionally chosen tuning at 440 Hz since, in Venice, in Vivaldi’s time, tuning was higher than in neighbouring musical centres such as Rome.

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 new recording by recorder player Dorothee Oberlinger with violinist and countertenor Dmitry Sinkovsky shows the musical turn of time from the Renaissance to the Baroque in a kaleidoscope of newly conceived, experimental declamatory music by Italian masters, who for the first time expressed passions such as love and hate, grief and joy, astonishment and longing in music to the fullest.

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.