Musica Pacifica, Christine Brandes, Jennifer Lane - Telemann: Chamber Cantatas & Trio Sonatas (2001)

Telemann could be exuberantly grotesque and also almost inhumanly serious. He loved large and brash and sometimes outré instrumental ensembles, and wrote brilliantly for them, but he also wrote copiously for small groups and for amateurs, in the most elegant style. One or two of his cantatas were once pardonably mistaken for Bach, and one or two movements of his orchestral suites might even now be mistaken for a mid-twentieth-century composer in a puckish mood. He is, in short, rather a difficult personality to pin down.
The music on this program belongs to the simpler and more straightforward end of the Telemannian spectrum, and all dates from his first fifteen years in the employ of the City of Hamburg, an appointment he held from 1721 until his death in 1767. That position was an arduous one, entailing (among other things) supplying the music of Hamburg's five principal churches. Telemann was responsible for two cantatas each Sunday and feast-day (that is, better than one hundred forty cantatas a year), as well as one Passion setting yearly and music for innumerable civic and occasional functions. -- Michelle Dulak