Germany's CPO label has presented the efforts of performers who have doggedly unearthed unknown music of various periods, especially the eighteenth century. With the voluminous corpus of concertos by Telemann, many of which exist only in manuscript, they enter a field with a lot of still-uncharted territory. This set of wind concertos is one of the label's most useful releases despite a few quirks.
Joseph Martin Kraus was born in the same year as Mozart and died only one year after him; like him, he was also a musician who revealed his extraordinary talent at an early age. It is only in recent years, however, that Kraus has again begun to receive somewhat more attention as a multitalented artistic personality. Born in Miltenberg am Main, Kraus enjoyed a career that took him to Stockholm as court music director to the music-loving King Gustavus III. In their originality his sacred compositions tower above the conventional liturgical repertoire produced in Southern Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century.
When it comes to old Italian vocal music, the Padua-born Italian choir "La Stagione Armonica" under the direction of Sergio Balestracci has repeatedly demonstrated its high musical level: "The sound they produce is extremely appealing in its firm expressiveness and in the way in which Balestracci's interpretive details somehow create a hint of simple but fervent piety, "wrote the press about his album on deutsche harmonia mundi with the responses that Alessandro Scarlatti composed for Holy Saturday.