Telemann Wind Concertos, Vol. 6-8 – Schneider

Telemann knew exactly what he thought of these pieces, and he was wrong.

He preferred the orchestral overture — the suite, the ouverture in the French manner, with its stately dotted rhythms and its parade of character pieces trailing behind. The solo concerto, to his mind, was a lesser thing, an Italian import he tolerated more than loved. And yet he wrote dozens of them, for oddball combinations nobody else would have thought to try, and the best of them are as inventive as anything in his enormous catalog. History does not always let composers have the last word about their own work. Thank goodness.

This sixth volume in CPO’s traversal of the wind concertos gives us four works that between them sum up nearly everything interesting about the composer’s mind at play. Michael Schneider leads from the recorder and transverse flute, and his colleagues in Camerata Köln and La Stagione Frankfurt play with the kind of easy, unforced virtuosity that comes only from decades spent inside this repertoire.

The Concerto in B minor for transverse flute is the anchor of the disc, and rightly so — it’s one of the largest, most ambitious solo utterances Telemann left behind for the instrument. Three movements, not four; the presto that opens it works in a rounded ABA shape, propulsive without ever feeling driven. But it’s the largo that stays with you. Karl Kaiser (on flute here, not piccolo) draws out a long, sighing line that has the melancholy of a much later century about it — there are moments that brush up against empfindsamer Stil, the “sensitive style” his godson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach would push toward something more radical a generation on. Telemann rarely gets credit for anticipating anything. He should.

Stranger, and to my ear more delightful, is the Concerto in D for flauto pastorale. Nobody quite knows what instrument Telemann had in mind, and Schneider’s team makes the reasonable, historically defensible choice of piccolo, on the theory that the birdsong imitations scattered through the piece (nightingales, unmistakably) match the prescription Telemann gives for piccolo in a similar aria in his opera Orpheus. Call it an educated guess dressed up as scholarship. It works. The nickname “Concerto polonoise” points to Telemann’s well-documented fascination with the folk music he heard during his years at the Promnitz court in Silesia and later in Kraków — those angular little Polish and Moravian dance tunes he claimed, in his autobiography, could inspire “a whole day’s” worth of ideas. All four movements here lean into that idiom, and the piccolo cackles and trills through it with real personality. Kaiser doesn’t just play the birdcalls, he characterizes them, gives them comic timing.

Then the French pair. The Concerto in C, “alla francese,” scored for two oboes and bassoon — Luise Baumgartl, Martin Stadler, Marita Schaar — is Telemann in his overture-writing comfort zone, shrunk down to concerto proportions: an avec douceur opening built as a rondeau, a très vite that dances rather than races, a tendrement that does exactly what it says. The reedy blend of two oboes against bassoon is a texture Telemann shared with Fasch and Graupner, his contemporaries at the Dresden and Darmstadt courts respectively. All three men mined a similar French-inflected vein, though Telemann’s part-writing has a wit theirs generally lacks.

The Concerto in B-flat for two recorders is the cleverest thing on the disc, structurally speaking. Two movements carry Italian tempo markings, the next two French ones — an odd, hybrid design that mirrors Telemann’s own cosmopolitan formation, half Italian sonata da chiesa, half Lullian ballet. The second movement is a small structural trick: the second half literally reverses the first, a retrograde within a da capo frame, audible if you’re listening for it and utterly natural if you’re not. Schneider and Martin Hüblow toss the sixteenth-note figuration back and forth in the finale with real sparkle, and the string band under them articulates every one of those repeated figures with a crispness that never curdles into fussiness.

Period-instrument recordings of this repertoire go back to Camerata Köln’s own earlier explorations and to various single-disc forays by the likes of Musica Antiqua Köln in the concertos that overlap this territory. But nobody has been as systematic, or as consistently well-prepared, as this CPO series has been across its full run. Intonation is clean without sounding scrubbed; there’s rasp on the oboe reeds where rasp belongs, and the horns — Ulrich Hübner and Jörg Schulteß, heard elsewhere in this series — sit comfortably in the ensemble rather than barking over it.

Telemann’s judgment about his own concertos was an old man’s tidying-up of a career, a preference stated late and stated often enough that scholars took it at face value for a couple of centuries. Recordings like this one are the correction. Not masterpieces on the order of the Bach concertos, no — Telemann himself would probably still shrug. But full of imagination, full of local color, full of small formal surprises that reward close listening. A first-rate entry in a genuinely important project.