Telemann controversially declared in his 1718 autobiography that his concertos ‘mostly smell of France’; he complained that the form generally contained ‘many difficulties and awkward leaps … little harmony and even poorer melody’.

There can be little doubt that these scathing remarks were directed principally at certain celebrated Italian composers, but the irony is that Telemann’s concertos imitate the Italian style so well, fused as they are with German, French and Polish elements in the manner of his famous ‘mixed taste’. His 1740 autobiography indicates a change of heart asserting that of all the national styles, he had absorbed that of Italy the last. His eventual acceptance of the Italian style led to many such works being performed at his public concerts and for concertos by Vivaldi, Albinoni and Tessarini being included as entr’acte entertainments during performances of his comic opera Pimpinone in Hamburg, 1725.

Telemann probably started composing concertos during his period at Eisenach, where he was in the employ of Duke Johann-Wilhelm of Saxe-Eisenach. It is also during this period that he initially met Johann Sebastian Bach (whose brother Johann Bernhard Bach was both town organist and court harpsichordist); Telemann and Bach got along so well that Telemann was named godfather to Carl Philip Emanuel Bach in 1714.

The two concertos presented here were probably composed during the 1720s after he had moved to Hamburg; here, he took up the post of Kantor of the Johanneum Lateinschule and became musical director of the city’s five main churches. The concertos are typical in their use of different national styles. The concerto for flute (TWV51:D2) opens with a polonaise ‘en rondeau’ before launching into a virtuosic Vivaldian fast movement. The second movement of the popular double concerto (TWV51:e2 )—a reworking of a movement from a sonata for oboe and continuo—is similarly Vivaldian whereas the movement embracing the style polonais is placed at the end of the piece.

Telemann’s decision to pair the flute and recorder is an odd one. Whilst it was not so unusual for the two instruments to play at different times in the same piece, such as in Handel’s Water Music or Vivaldi’s C minor setting of the Salve regina (RV616), it was extremely rare to find the two instruments playing simultaneously. The only other known work by Telemann where the instruments appear side by side is the quartet sonata from the Musique de Table for recorder, 2 flutes and continuo (TWV43:d1).

Telemann encountered a wealth of Italian music through the dissemination of manuscripts and available publications. He knew many Italian musicians and composers who plied their trade north of the Alps, but perhaps the most influential figure in this respect was his lifelong friend, the violinist Johann Georg Pisendel.

Pisendel had studied the violin with Torelli whilst he was a chorister at the court of Ansbach. On leaving Ansbach, Pisendel journeyed to the University of Leipzig (where Telemann also studied) stopping off en route in Weimar where he met Bach. He then proceeded to the court of Dresden in 1712, in whose employ he remained for the rest of his life. It was whilst accompanying the electoral prince on one of his many tours that he met and befriended Vivaldi. Pisendel spent nine months studying both violin and composition with Vivaldi in Venice in 1716, before returning to continue his studies in 1717.

As well as being a violinist of the highest rank and an extremely talented composer, Pisendel assumed the duties of copyist-in-chief for the Dresden court orchestra. A huge amount of repertoire from this court survives today thanks to Pisendel, including the sonata for viola d’amore, flute and continuo (TWV42:D15). Interestingly, there survives—in the same library—another copy of this work for scordatura violin, flute and continuo in the hand of Vivaldi’s principal copyist and brother-in-law, Giovanni Antonio Mauro; this, alongside two other sonatas for flute and violin, was probably a work that Pisendel brought with him to Italy on his 1716-17 sojourn.

Whilst the influence of the Italian style on German composers has received much musicological discussion, little has so far been written about the impact of other national styles on the Italians. One Italian who successfully adopted a pan-European outlook was Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello. Originally from Bologna, Brescianello spent the greater part of his career at the court of Württemberg near Stuttgart where he successfully fused the Italian style with those of France, Germany and even England. Brescianello is almost the only Italian to have composed orchestral suites (a form in which Telemann and Fasch excelled), yet he also composed concertos that, predominantly Italian in their outlook, displayed a harmonic language of which any German composer would have been proud. Whilst Brescianello’s output did not reach the quantities of Telemann or Vivaldi, the music that does survive shows him to have been a composer of exceptional talent. In addition to his orchestral suites, sinfonias and concertos, Brescianello also composed sets of chamber music including 18 suites for colascione (a plucked instrument not dissimilar in appearance to that of the lute), 10 sonatas for 2 flutes or violins and continuo, and a set of 12 trio sonatas (titled ‘concertos’) for 2 violins and continuo, including the Concerto in E♭. This collection, held in the library of the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, is somewhat of a last hurrah for the trio sonata. The works are inspired, both in terms of musical content and in the level of technique required for their performance.

It is tempting to imagine that his virtuosic style was the result of time spent in Venice working for the exiled Electress of Bavaria, Theresa Kunegunda Sobieska. The Electress befriended many musicians including Vivaldi whom she proposed as Kapellmeister when the Bavarian court reformed in 1714. It is highly likely therefore that Brescianello at least met Vivaldi in Venice, and given Vivaldi’s commercial success with the virtuoso concerto, it is understandable why composers such as Brescianello would try to follow suit.

Without a doubt, the quantity of instrumental music composed by Vivaldi is staggering. To have composed around 500 concertos and 100 sonatas is even more impressive when one considers that Vivaldi prioritised his career as an impresario and composer of operas over everything else. As well as writing works for his own private use, he also supplied many concertos to the Ospedale della Pietà (the Venetian foundling institution with which he was associated for much of his life) and to the theatre, where his concertos provided entr’acte entertainments.

Although Vivaldi’s own instrument, the violin, is doubtless his preferred solo instrument, he was always keen to experiment with different instrumentation, particularly wind instruments, for which the Pietà was a rare Italian centre. The manuscript for the concerto for recorder, strings, and continuo in F (RV442) survives as part of Vivaldi’s personal collection in Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale. The work also forms part of Vivaldi’s Opus 10 flute concertos (1729), but it is clearly the recorder concerto that is the earlier of the two versions, the manuscript bearing annotated evidence of the transposition of the slow movement for the Opus 10 publication.

One other item of note is the presence of an abandoned slow movement. It is not unheard of for Vivaldi to break off after a false start, but the fact that he got so far with this particular movement is unusual. The entire ‘A’ section has been completed in addition to the first three bars of the ‘B’ section. On account of the quality of music contained within the fragment, it was decided that we should complete the fragment and include it on this recording.

The destination for this concerto was almost certainly the Pietà, though equally it could have been written with Vivaldi’s colleague from the Pietà in mind, the woodwind player Ignaz Sieber. Little is known about Sieber; he almost certainly came from north of the Alps and is best remembered for his work at the Pietà where his first name was changed to Ignazio. Sieber’s service there spanned two periods; the first from 1713 to 1716 when he was Maestro di oboe and the second longer period from 1728 to 1757 when he held the position of Maestro di traversiè. Information on his whereabouts for the periods prior to 1713 and between 1716 and 1727 place him in Rome and it was probably Sieber (or maybe Ignatio Rion, another north-Italian oboist) who took the first oboe part in Handel’s La resurrezione in 1708. It was during this Roman period that he composed the six sonatas that were published (alongside 6 sonatas by Johann Ernst Galliard) in Amsterdam in c1722. The sonatas show the influence of Vivaldi to such an extent that some musicologists have questioned whether the real author is Sieber or Vivaldi himself. Whoever the composer was, the sonatas are a wonderful addition to the Italian recorder repertory of the period. That Sieber’s reappearance in Venice in 1727 occurred around the same time as Vivaldi’s opera Orlando furioso (RV728), the only known opera to contain a flute obligato (and the hardest flute part that he ever penned) is a tempting coincidence for musicologists to stress.

Initially, this programme was destined to include a violin sonata by the Milan-based Swiss composer, Johann Friedrich Schreivogel, but it became clear that we would have far too much music for the album. At the eleventh hour, at the end of the recording sessions for the second volume of Vivaldi’s Opus 8, we recorded a fragment of a sonata, possibly by the Neapolitan, Francesco Durante. If the attribution is correct, this would represent a rare foray into the realms of instrumental music for Durante whose output largely consisted of sacred vocal music. Indeed, if you discount a reasonably large body of music for either solo harpsichord or organ, fewer than 20 pieces of pure instrumental music—and only one violin sonata—survive today.

Adrian Chandler © 2025