Schneider Telemann

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.

Around the middle of it 18th century began a basic stylistic A radical change in the history of music: the Baroque took its farewell and classical music made its entrance. Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the first to perceive and enthusiastically take up the new, fresh wind. At an age at which others have long since retired, a second creative spring almost began for him: the German Singspiel had just been launched by composers of the young generation, such as Hiller and Dittersdorf, the 80-year-old Telemann sits down with a 20-year-old librettist and sets the story of "Don Quixote at the Marriage of Comacho" to music full of wit and grace.

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.

1716 veröffentlichte Telemann Die Kleine Kammermusik, eine Sammlung von sechs Partiten für Melodieinstrument und Generalbaß. Was an Einfallsreichtum und Individualität in diesen auch für Laien gedachten Stücken steckt, haben Michael Schneider und seine Camerata Köln bereits vor acht Jahren mit dezenter Leidenschaft und profunder Stilkompetenz demonstriert (cpo CD 999 497-2). Nun stellt Schneider mit La Stagione Frankfurt eine Orchesterfassung dieser Musik vor, die Telemann Mitte der 1720er Jahre erstellt hat. Die Ober- und die Unterstimme sind dabei im wesentlichen unverändert, die beiden Mittelstimmen hinzukomponiert worden.