Kurt Redel conducts unaffectedly but with passion and is beautifully supported in this with an excellent orchestra and beautifully balanced choir of faultless intonation. The story moves at a good pace as the the tragedy unfolds and is interspersed with some stunning arias, many of them affording moments of still reflection as is befitting for a passion. The singers are faultless and often superb with Sena Jurinac at the height of her artistry, Theo Altmeyer a fine evangelist who knows how to tell a story. Franz Crass always was a lovely, musical singer with a well-rounded, rich voice.

The five cantatas presented on this disc share several elements. They are all for solo bass and orchestra, and Der am Ölberg zagende Jesus deals with Christ’s agonies in the garden of Gethsemane, with three recitatives setting the scene surrounding two arias for Jesus, ending with an aria by the narrator inviting all to contemplate Christ’s sacrifice. Jesus liegt in letzten Zügen is a meditation on the moment of Christ’s death. Ich will den Kreuzweg gerne gehen expresses the narrator’s desire to follow the way of the cross in Christ’s footsteps. The other two cantatas are more tangentially connected to the events of the passion, although they mention the passion as motivation for the sinner to prepare for eventual union with his Savior.

Our CD presents a selection of five works from the extensive, largely unexplored Easter Cantata oeuvre created by Georg Philipp Telemann during the course of his sixty years in Eisenach (1708-12), Frankfurt am Main (1712-21), and Hamburg (1721-67). Four of the works recorded here date from the 1720s and take us back to the years in Telemann’s creative life as a composer when he was the new music director of Hamburg’s five principal churches and was reorganizing the city’s church music and modernizing it in musical respects.

This is the sixth CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas in Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to appear in print. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, violin, transverse flute or oboe) and basso continuo, and generally take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

This is the fifth CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann's collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 — the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be appear in print. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, violin, transverse flute or oboe) and basso continuo, and generally take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann's cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

This is the fourth CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann's collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 — the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to appear in print. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, violin, transverse flute or oboe) and basso continuo, and generally take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann's cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

This is the third CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be published. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument – recorder (as on this disc), violin, transverse flute or oboe – and basso continuo, and take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

This is the second CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be published. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (violin on this disc) and basso continuo, and take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

This is the first CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be published. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, violin, transverse flute or oboe) and basso continuo, and take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

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.

George Frideric Handel and Hamburg town councillor and poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes were students at the same time in Halle, and it's probable that they knew each other and were perhaps even friends. Brockes wrote a nine-volume anthology, from the first volume of which Handel, between 1724 and 1727, set his Nine German Arias. In translation, the Brockes work is titled "Earthly Delight in God, Consisting of Physical and Moral Poems," the texts reflecting pleasure in the glory of God's natural creation. Handel had been writing opera in England since 1710; the reason behind the composition of these arias, his last works in German, and which were unpublished in his lifetime, remains unknown.

By comparison with the ambitious, sometimes pioneering products of the last musically active decade of his life (1755-1765) much of Telemann's chamber music is conventional in language if not always in form. Nevertheless, we should guard against any assessment which views it as merely fluent. Telemann's chamber suites and cantatas, solo sonatas, trios, quartets and songs almost invariably carry the hallmark of a composer whose understanding of the voices and instruments for which he is writing is both imaginatively practical and technically informed.

The three cantatas brought together here are from Telemann’s last printed annual cycle, which was published in Hermsdorf (near Hirschberg), Silesia, in 1749. Each cantata has a title page indicating the particular Sunday, registering the ensemble parts under it, and displaying a decorative figure modeled on a putto as an ornament on the lower half of the page. Since the putto was also understood as an angel, the cycle came to be known as the »Engel-Jahrgang« (Angel Cycle). In addition, the title contains a pithy motto that seems to be referring to Telemann: »You glorify the sweet harmony of the art of music and sanctify it.« As in his other annual cycles issued in printed form, the compositions were presented in Hamburg churches prior to their publication or along with it. These are joyful works of dancy verve to which Telemann supplied additional splendor in many movements through the use of trumpets.

Georg Philipp Telemann - cpo friends have long known - is always good for surprises. He was a diligent and also important opera composer who wrote about 35 operas for the Hamburg Opera between 1721 and 1733, of which unfortunately only nine have survived. These are, without exception, important contributions to German opera history; recent performances have all proved their viability and power, but above all the originality, the music-dramatic sense and the always attractive melody of Telemann revealed.

Last year’s Magdeburg Festival Days were marked by an extraordinary event: the revival of Telemann’s last known extant passion composition, the St. Luke Passion of 1748, by the Rheinische Kantorei and the Kleines Konzert under Hermann Max. In the mid-nineteenth century the autograph made its way to Berlin, where it today is preserved as the only source for this composition. The historical edition was prepared especially for the modern repeat performance in Magdeburg. Every four years Telemann returned to the same passion narrative, always employing the language of music to occupy himself in new ways with the gospel message of each of the four evangelists.