Faces of Europe

Viola da gamba virtuoso Vittorio Ghielmi, from Milan, will once again lead the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra. The almost exclusive protagonist of their concert program will be Georg Philipp Telemann. Soloists will also appear on the stage: flutist Dorothee Oberlinger, cymbal player Marcel Comendant and violinist Stanislav Palúch. In the second part of the evening, these musicians will break the sound of a seventeenth-century band with folk improvisations. We will therefore look at the faces of Europe from two different perspectives.

Georg Philipp Telemann left behind about one hundred and twenty-five orchestral suites (called overtures), as many concertos and a great number of other instrumental works. Works intended for large ensembles were rarely published in print. This meant she had an incidental role and limited reach. For compositions of this kind, titles of an illustrative nature — for example, related to travel — were notable. We will hear them in the first part of the event, in which the musicians will remain faithful to the conventions of historical performance. Telemann has traveled many countries in Europe. As part of the first overture, his musical portraits of Turks, Swiss, Muscovites and Portuguese will sound. The name of the Alster suite comes from the river at the mouth of which Hamburg was founded — it contains a thrilling concert of crows and frogs. In addition, the program will include Irish, Neapolitan, French, Italian motifs (the aria uses a simple flute) and finally Polish.

The music of our country was of considerable interest to Telemann. Magdeburczyk noted it, delighted with its “barbaric beauty” (he also meant the Moravian work represented in the program by Hanasky). So there will be no shortage of dances from his manuscript found in the 1970s in Rostock. In addition, an anonymous Saltus polonicus will be made from a collection of compositions of this type, discovered in 1956 in Uhrovec (today Slovakia). All this will be embellished with the improvisational skills of Marcel Comendant and Stanislav Palúch. They will link them to the heritage of the area of former Poland and Hungary. This music-rich concert part of the evening will thus become a space for musical dialogue with the past.