Georg Philipp Telemann - cpo friends have long known - is always good for surprises. He was a diligent and also important opera composer who wrote about 35 operas for the Hamburg Opera between 1721 and 1733, of which unfortunately only nine have survived. These are, without exception, important contributions to German opera history; recent performances have all proved their viability and power, but above all the originality, the music-dramatic sense and the always attractive melody of Telemann revealed.
How admirably Telemann succeeds may be heard listening to these concertos. Eschewing the Italian three-movement model of fast-slow-fast, he adheres to the German layout of four movements: slow-fast-slow-fast. Also in contrast to the works of his Italian counterparts, who not infrequently fell into the lazy habit of writing the same concerto over and over again, each of Telemann’s examples is strikingly different, not just in its instrumentation, but in its melodic and harmonic content and in the patterning of its passagework. Nonetheless, exquisitely beautiful as some of his slow movements are—listen to the Largo of the A-Major Oboe d’amore Concerto—it would be disingenuous to pretend that Telemann (or German Baroque composers in general) ever mastered the art of the Italian instrumental cantilena that grew out of the melodiousness of the language and Italy’s long vocal tradition. Nothing in these concertos can compare, for example, to the timeless beauty of the Adagio from Albinoni’s D-Minor Oboe Concerto, op. 9/2, written at approximately the same time as the Telemann.
It is not certain that all the music on this disc is by Scarlatti; the manuscript that contains the nine Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday and four Lenten motets is unsigned and in places incomplete. Conductor Sergio Balestracci is confident of their authorship, however, on stylistic grounds and because Scarlatti is reported to have composed settings of these Passiontide meditations in ‘the solid style of Palestrina’ for the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1708.
The varied forces of Georg Philipp Telemann's instrumental music require a flexible ensemble to give a sense of the music's range. In this case, two German historical-instrument ensembles, La Stagione Frankfurt and the veteran Camerata Köln, join forces for a set of concertos with a delightfully varied set of soloists. This music has the odd combination of lightness and unorthodoxy that tends to either attract or repel those who listen to Telemann. The concertos, in three or four Italianate movements, are among his most progressive works, none more so than the Concerto in D major for two horns, strings, and continuo, TWV 52:D1, where the continuity of Baroque texture breaks up entirely: at one point the horns seem to inhabit their own stately sphere as the strings pause to let them pass. But each of the concertos has moments as unusual, if not quite as dramatic. (James Manheim)