Customer Reviews

Georg Philipp Telemann: Fortsetzung des Harmonischen Gottesdienstes

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... would make this a compelling performance. Soprano Ruth Ziesak has at least 20 Cds in active distribution, but this is the best she's ever sounded, her voice unusually big and rich for an "early music" specialist yet perfectly tuned and inflected with "historically informed" flexibility throughout. In another review, I've suggested comparing these solo cantatas by Georg Philip Telemann, as sung by Ziesak, with the 'Concerto Köln' CD of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, also featuring Ziesak. But it's not entirely a fair comparison; Ziesak sings very much more proficiently on this more recent CD of Telemann from the 'Camerata Köln', and that ensemble of period instruments provides all the elegance of musical context that Telemann's music demands. There are also four short fugues for organ spacing the five cantatas apart. Telemann was perhaps less committed to keyboard works than Bach, but there's nothing weak or frivolous about his fugues.

The five cantatas come from Telemann's enormous publications of 1725-1732 - The Harmonious Divine Service & The Continuation of the Harmonious Divine Service. 1725 wasn't such a good year for Telemann the human being; his wife Anna Caterina 'betrayed' him with another man and ran up a debt amounting, according to scholars, to the equivalent of 300,000 Euros -- more money than JS Bach saw in his whole career. Telemann assembled the Harmonisches Gottesdienst for publication, not just out of abundant musical creativity but also out of pressing debt. The five cantatas are all display pieces for soprano virtuosity as well as wonderfully complex counterpoint, handled with Telemann's delicate unobtrusive technical profundity. There are gorgeous instrumental obbligatos in each of them, for violin/cello; for flutes and violins; for recorder and oboe; for flute and oboe; and again for flutes and violins.