Hidden Treasures of Baroque Chamber Music for Recorder
During the first third of the eighteenth century the recorder enjoyed an outstanding golden age in the territory of present-day Germany. Once the new Baroque type of instrument developed in France began to spread in Germany too from the turn of the century – an initiative of the Denner family of instrument makers in Nuremberg – the instrument’s image changed lastingly. Hitherto the instrument of professional players, town pipers and civic waits, it now took its place alongside keyboard instruments, the lute and the viol as a prestigious instrument in the hands of noble “connoisseurs and amateurs”.
Princes in Brunswick, Stuttgart and Munich considered the recorder as befitting their rank as did members of the upper middle classes. As part of the standard instrumentarium of court chapels and opera orchestras alike, and of church and civic ensembles, the “flûte douce” was accordingly taken into account in the compositional output of the day. Besides its deliberate use to underline particular affects in operas and instrumental works – impressions of nature, birdsong or dream scenes, for example – a series of concertante and chamber works appeared with the recorder as solo instrument. These were addressed both to the newly emerged Group of “connoisseurs and amateurs” and to the growing number of outstanding woodwind players, who as a rule commanded the oboe, the recorder and the transverse flute alike.
In the process, the leading composers of the day extended and exhausted the instrument’s possibilities to a degree previously unknown.
Despite the instrument’s wide Dissemination and evident popularity, the number of compositions by composers from the German-speaking lands that survive today is astonishingly small. While recent decades have opened up substantial portions of a hitherto unknown Baroque repertoire for a variety of scorings, new discoveries for the recorder remain rarities. The present recording brings together several such discoveries of recent years which – combined with one of the best-known of all recorder sonatas, Telemann’s Sonata in C Major from the Essercizii Musici – also offer a cross-section of the stylistic Variety of German composition in the first third of the eighteenth century.
Founded in 2021, the ensemble Acanthus Baroque is composed of the recorder player Magdalena Spielmann, the violinist Christophe Mourault, the harpsichordist Sobin Jo and the cellist Szczepan Dembiński who met during their studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the pôle Aliénor in Poitiers, France. The focus of their interest is to make the extensive, in part little known Repertoire of baroque instrumental music with recorder known to a wider audience.