With umpteen billions, well, okay hundreds, of instrumental pieces in the Telemann catalog, you’d think more than one of his suites (overtures) would get all the attention. But the Suite in A minor for recorder, strings, and continuo seems to be the overwhelming favorite of performers and their record labels. Although it features superb, often dazzling solo work from recorder player Stefano Bagliano and (in the F major concerto) bassoonist Paolo Tognon, this present recording fails to measure up to the tighter ensemble/soloist interplay and superior sonics of Cunningham/Verbruggen on Harmonia Mundi (which features both the suite and gamba concerto) and, in the bassoon piece, the unsurpassed performances of Michael McCraw and Clas Pehrsson on BIS, a 1988 recording that still impresses for its exemplary sound. And it’s in the area of sound that this disc is particularly disappointing. While treble registers come out clearly and with natural timbres, the bass is rather tubby and ill-defined, and there’s an overall claustrophobic quality to the ensemble presence. Telemann’s music is often brilliant (the solo recorder passages of “Les Plaisirs” and “Rejouissance” in the suite) and charming (the “Air à l’Italien” in the same work), and never less than engaging and entertaining. The concerto with bassoon is well worth multiple hearings, and as often happens with Telemann, you hear a work like this and you remember what a mistake it is to place his music in a secondary role to other more exalted composers of his era. This is good stuff–good stuff that deserves a better recording, but whose virtues also should prompt performers to look beyond these few favorites before making up their next Telemann program.
