Il Fondamento . Paul Dombrecht

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) may well have been Europe's most famous composer during his lifetime, but since the nineteenth century he has had to contend with Johann Sebastian Bach. Certainly when it comes to religious music, the obligatory comparison often goes against Telemann. Bach's cantatas, passions and oratorios are quite simply one of the peaks of Western music, and any comparison with them is doomed. Yet in this case there is little point in the comparison and it is much more meaningful to judge Telemann's religious music on its own qualities. And there are plenty of them: Telemann repeatedly succeeded in capturing with the utmost precision the emotions in the text, often with more limited means than Bach had at his disposal. It is quite a job to select the best from over a thousand cantatas Telemann wrote, since the majority of them are not available in modern published form. In this programme, Paul Dombrecht once again proves himself a convinced advocate of the still uncultivated but valuable baroque repertoire.