This 25CD set presents the most famous, iconic and best-loved works from the Baroque Era, works which are part of our common musical heritage and conscience, eternally young and cherished for their charm, beauty and deeply human emotions, shared by audiences all over the world.
Played by specialized Early Music Groups like L’Arte Dell’arco, Musica Amphion, Violini Capricciosi, Musica ad Rhenum and many others.

Telemann’s musical legacy is extremely extensive and comprises all the customary musical genres of his time. Typical of Telemann are cantabile melodies, inventively applied timbres and, especially in his late works, unusual harmonic effects as well. The instrumental works frequently reveal the strong influence of French and Italian music, and occasionally folkloristic Polish influences as well. Stefan Schilli, solo oboist of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, has strongly committed himself to this repertoire on BR Klassik; this forms the basis for the creation of the present CD with Schilli’s “Accademia giocosa” as a co-production with that broadcasting station.

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.

Georg Philipp Telemann’s Twelve Fantasias for Solo Flute TWV 40: 2-13 are a rich source of information on the different stylistic forms, emotions and rhetoric conventions employed in Baroque Music. They offer the performer the opportunity to play the operatic, orchestral and chamber-music repertoire of the time on a solo melody instrument.
The 12 Fantasias are especially demanding for the musician and are therefore rarely recorded. Dorothee Oberlinger, as one of the best of her kind, does so with the greatest of ease.

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.

Thomas Stacy is widely known through his recordings, television appearances and as English hornist with the New York Philharmonic. He also has a passion for playing the English horn’s smaller relative, the oboe d’amore.

Vittorio Ghielmi is known for the intensity and versatility of his musical interpretations and for his new approach to the viola da gamba and the sound of the early music repertoire. His ensemble, Il Suonar Parlante, is devoted to investigating early music repertoire and has also performed with jazz, flamenco and traditional Asian musicians.

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.