The high-powered Italian approach to the performance of Baroque music on authentic instruments has mostly been confined to concerted music, but here's a wild chamber music example. The program consists of six sonatas from Telemann's early 1730s collection entitled Essercizii Musicii, literally musical exercises, but really more of a compendium of small-ensemble sonata types in circulation at the time. It's only recently that performers have managed to bring these alive; played straight, they're deadly dull. These performances by Italy's
Collegium Pro Musica are anything but dull, however. The booklet notes are a bit bewildering; they deal in large part with the Sonate methodiche, which are not the works recorded here. The general point is clear, though; this ensemble, and recorder soloist
Stefano Bagliano foremost, believes in heavy ornamentation along the lines of the procedures described by violin virtuosi like Corelli and Locatelli. The result is melody lines in the fast movement that require extreme agility on the part of
Bagliano and of
Frederico Guglielmo on the violin, duly supplied. What's more, the continuo realizations (cello and harpsichord or theorbo) are extraordinarily dense and active. The sound produced by the group is heavily percussive, full, and fast, a real rock & roll experience for the listener, although this is certainly not the only way to play Telemann. The slow movements seem a bit labored, and the recording as a whole diverges considerably from the general tendency to emphasize the element of simplicity in Telemann. Too, it might have been good to hear a word about the use of a recorder instead of a transverse flute (more usual by the 1730s), and about the instruments used. There's no denying, though, that these performances are a lot of fun, and the aims of the engineers are well in tune with those of the performers.