c2 Schreiben

Champagne pour le centième opus de la collection, avec la plus viennoise des Chauve-Souris, et un plateau de friandises invitant Wunderlich, Kunz, Streich, Gedda, Köth, Jurinac ou Schwarzkopf à la fête.

Gebel, who isn’t mentioned in any of the current music encyclopedias, clearly proves–on evidence of this very fine Passion–that he was worthy of acclaim (confirmed by various contemporaty sources) and was capable of original ideas and possessed the creative resources to write music of sustained drama and interest. While this passion setting is nowhere near as powerfully affecting in either the spiritual or theatrical sense as those of Bach, it does offer consistently appealing and emotionally meaningful musical realizations, spread among numerous arias, choral movements, and chorales. Gebel also was quite adept at colorful scoring, exemplified in his fascinating combinations of instruments such as horns, oboe, bassoon, violins (often pizzicato), and theorbo (highlighted in a solo during one of the arias late in the work).

Telemann had made reference to writing twenty operas during his four years in Leipzig, but sadly the scores have been lost and very few librettos and arias are extant. Michael Maul has proven that some 40 arias discovered at the Frankfurt University Library were from Telemann’s Germanicus and its modern premiere took place with Gotthold Schwarz and the Saxon Baroque Orchestra. Germanicus is a tale of love, lust and political intrigue based very loosely on events during the first-century occupation of Teutonic territory by the Romans. Since only arias survive, for recitatives Maul substituted a tongue-in-cheek narrative wittily delivered by actor Dieter Bellmann.