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GRAMOPHONE (07/2015)
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Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp
 

Two discs of Telemann concertos and ouverture-suites, both by ensembles of similar size, even with a work in common (an achievement when you consider just how much Telemann there is to choose from). How to distinguish between them? Well, actually it’s not so difficult. Barokkanerne, a Norwegian group with a strong line in guest directors, offer four concertos and the ouverture-suite celebrating the Frankfurt stock exchange in whose swanky building Telemann had his apartment. The suite’s enigmatic movement headings (‘Le répos interrompu’, ‘La solitude associée’, etc) have had programme-note-writers groping for unconvincing explanations for years (reader, I was one), only to be exposed by the discovery that the overall title of ‘La bourse’ came from a 20th-century publisher. Ah well, whatever it is about, Barokkanerne do not characterise it that much here, and it is instead in the four concertos that they are at their best. Alfredo Bernardini breezes by to lead a lusty oboe concerto with customarily fluid ease (the piece starts on an alarming dissonance, by the way); Kati Debretzeni reveals a natural security and musicality in a violin concerto with a lovely slow movement; and she and Torun Kirby Torbo show plenty of suave expressive detail in a concerto for flute and violin with another terrifically touching Adagio. Kirby Torbo later teams up with Ingeborg Christophersen in the evergreen Concerto for flute and recorder, liquidly played and as exhilarating in its ‘Polish’ finale as ever.

French group Les Ambassadeurs are more outgoing, with a bigger sound right from when two horns blast their way into the hunt-obsessed Ouverture in F and pretty much refuse to go away, even when the rest of the orchestra is dancing a sarabande. Happily their boisterous company is respectful (if a tad tipsy), until they bring things to end with a clamorous ‘Fanfare’ based on the horn-call signifying the kill. Jean-François and Pierre-Yves Madeuf, playing fully natural horns, bring a joyously loose-lipped and fruitily tuned flavour to it all. Elsewhere there is another violin concerto, this time with an opening Adagio that seems borrowed from some tragic opera scene. Zefira Valova is a spindly soloist compared to Debretzeni, and is recorded a touch too closely for my liking, but her flat-coloured sound does contribute something to the lachrymose quality of this unusual movement. She is nimble, however, in the flute and violin concerto, in which that extraordinary Adagio has a stiller quality than that of the Norwegians, though maybe that is another way of saying they do less with it. Director Alexis Kossenko is the soloist in two D major flute concertos, wanting more grace in the oom-cha first movement of D1, but in D2 establishing a proud polonaise rhythm in the first movement, tumbling and trickling deliciously through the Largo and leading a rustic reel in the finale. This is great stuff; but when all is said and done it is that horn-fuelled Ouverture, guaranteed to raise a smile, that remains the star of this release.

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