How do I interest you in this latest addition to the increasingly stressed shelves on which CD shops display their Telemann selections? The disc’s title makes no greater effort than ‘Telemann String Concertos’, and none of the seven works it contains has the meagrest descriptive title to set the imagination running – there is not a summer storm or a cuckoo in sight. Only the Viola Concerto is a work which many listeners (or, rather, repertoire-starved violists) are likely to have encountered before.
Ah well, I will just have to make do with telling you that the two works entitled Concerto ‘polonois’ – full of exotic folky melodies and rustic drone effects – are typical examples of Telemann remembering the time he spent in Silesia in his mid-twenties; the two multi-movement divertimentos, composed in the 1760s, show the aged composer stepping out with the younger generation and slipping in and out of their modish galant language with enchanting ease; and the Concerto a sei for two violins and four-part strings includes double-stopping which foreshadows the Double Violin Concerto of Bach – at least Reinhard Goebel reckons so, adding in his booklet-note the provocative but reasonable observation that ‘wherever Bach went, Telemann was there before him’.
This is not to say that, faced with a choice between Telemann’s string concertos and Bach’s, one should choose the former. Let us retain some sense of perspective. But this is a Telemann release worthy of consideration. As so often before, Goebel shows enormous relish for the task of bringing this maligned but engagingly human composer to life. The performances are tightly controlled as ever, but they are nevertheless full-blooded; the clipped rhythms of the Polish pieces are punched out with tremendous swagger and energy, the fast music bustles by in a whirl of dust, and the string sound is remarkably fruity for a band of only a dozen or so. There are places, indeed, where Goebel lays things on a bit too thick – sometimes we get a rather beery sort of Polishness – and one can find oneself yearning for more lightness. But then, we do not expect Musica Antiqua Koln to sound ordinary, do we? And how can you pass by, without at least a second look, a recording that features among its orchestral instruments something called a chalzedon?'