Does Telemann ever
disappoint? Very rarely, in my experience. He doesn’t, of course,
make more than an occasional and relatively distant approach
to the profundity and sublimity of Bach; one will inspect his
work largely in vain if one seeks music that has the passion
and panache of Scarlatti; he rarely has the sheer rhythmic drive
of Vivaldi – to compare him with just three near contemporaries.
But Telemann’s music has, behind a considerable variety of style,
an all-pervading sense of common humanity, especially a sense
of what one might call social humanity. In him the conversation
of instruments seems to express the dynamics of social intercourse
with a particular intimacy and forcefulness. Telemann’s music
is subtle and elegant in its oblique expression of how human
beings behave towards one another at those times when society
‘works’. His is not the music of the heroic individual or, indeed,
of profound innerness or spirituality, but rather of dialogue,
of social relations. He is a musical poet of complementarity
rather than conflict. For the most part, his music is melodic
and its rhythms are largely symmetrical. He tends to avoid excess
or exaggerated rhetoric; there is a consistent sense in his
music of instruments behaving towards one another with the kind
of consideration desirable in a harmonious social group.
Many of these virtues
are evident in the attractive music collected on this present
disc. It is part of an ongoing series – this is volume five;
unfortunately I have heard only fragments of the previous four
volumes. The present selection is delightfully various – anybody
who thinks, as some appear to, of Telemann as a merely repetitive
composer (a suspicion always felt about artists as prolific
as he was) need only listen to the six compositions here in
order to be disabused of that assumption. The four-movement
Concerto in A major, which opens the programme, is scored for
two violins, viola and continuo. It is full of playful metamorphoses
of its basic material; the brief third movement, marked grave,
is surely something of which any contemporary Italian composer
would have been proud; its closing allegro is a witty study
in imitative patterns and has a genuine rhythmic drive. The
four movements of the trio sonata in D minor are a perfect example
of the dialogic quality of Telemann’s music, the conversational
exchanges between recorder and violin (this is a piece for recorder,
violin and continuo) are sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct
– just as spoken conversations are! The seductive dance rhythms
of the closing presto presto make the conversation decidedly
flirtatious.
The Ouverture in
G minor is, by some distance, the longest piece included in
the present selection. It is scored for two solo violins, two
ripieno violins, and continuo. It is a very good-humoured piece,
the essence of sociability, as the music repeatedly switches
between solo and tutti. Its seven movements include a rondeau,
a passepied, a sarabande, a passacaglia and a minuet and the
whole invokes and celebrates the stylised social harmony of
the dance. This is a lovely piece, albeit one of no great profundity,
which is full of engaging interplay between soloists and ensemble,
not least in the witty fifth movement, ‘Eccho vistement’.
The so-called Quadro
of TWV 43:G6 – essentially a concerto – is a graceful, unforced
composition, for recorder, oboe, violin and continuo. Its three
movements (allegro-grave-allegro) are altogether unpretentious
and intimate three way conversations - four if one counts the
continuo, whose contribution is essential, after all. I have
referred to three way conversations but, in fact, the two woodwinds
only rarely become independent voices. The central slow movement
is melancholic, even elegiac, though the emotion expressed never
goes beyond the socially acceptable, as it were. Telemann’s
astute ear for the differentiations of instrumental colour is
very delightfully evident in the closing allegro.
The Sonata in C
major, for four violins without continuo, is a fascinating
and delightful exercise in imitation and echo, modulation and
metamorphosis; this is ‘conversation’ of a particularly sophisticated
kind, as the four violins play in constantly changing groupings
and combinations; for all the use of canon and fugue this never
sounds like an academic exercise. There is too much vivacity
for that, too much dialogic give and take. A minor masterpiece,
rarely heard, it is not hard to fancy that in listening to it
one is hearing a transitional point in the movement from consort
of viols to string quartet.
Musica Alta Ripa
close the present programme with one of the works included in
Telemann’s 1716 publication Kleine Cammer-Music, bestehend
aus VI Partiten. There is less sense of ‘conversation’ here,
in a piece written for recorder and continuo. Even when writing
for a ‘featured’ soloist, Telemann largely resists the temptation
of virtuoso display. The Partia (or Partita) is made up of and
opening andante followed by six arias, all essentially binary
in construction. The initial andante is pleasantly peaceful
and all of the succeeding arias – which vary in length from
under forty-five seconds to almost three minutes – have something
of interest to offer. I have, though, to say that I find Telemann
writing for a single soloist less interesting – at least in
this case – than Telemann writing for two or more soloists.
Telemann is less a monologist than a writer of dialogue; his
music seems to come more fully alive when instruments exchange
ideas, when each comments on what the other has just said –
in applause or mockery, in the flattery of imitation or the
irony of mild parody.
Alta Musica Ripa clearly
have a thorough understanding of Telemann’s music; they are entirely
at home in this repertoire; without any inappropriate flashiness
or egotistical self-assertion they put themselves wholly at the
service of this highly sociable music. They sound, indeed, precisely
the kind of ‘harmonious’ social group of which Telemann’s music
seems so often to both speak and embody. The recorded sound is
exemplary, clear but intimate, not overly assertive or insistent.
Glyn Pursglove
Musica Alta
Ripa: Danya Segal (recorder); Hans-Peter Westermann (oboe); Anne
Röhrig, Ursual Bundies, Susanne Dietz (violin); Christoph Heidemann
(violin, viola); Juris Teichmanis, Albert Brüggen (cello); Barbara
Hofmann (violone); Dennis Götte (chitarrone); Bernward Lohr (harpsichord)
