SHOP

BIS Records 2508; released 20th December 2024

Sound Engineer: Oscar Torres

In August 1742, the composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) wrote to his friend Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach: ‘While music is my field and plough, and serves to give me many of my keenest pleasures, over the past few years I have found a new companion, namely the love of flowers.’ 

The music on A Gift for your Garden celebrates Telemann’s horticultural friendships, and the joy to be found in the giving and receiving of flowers. In his enthusiasm for horticulture, Telemann was just one of countless well-to-do individuals embracing a craze for botany sweeping eighteenth-century Europe. Telemann’s new hobby was certainly no idle passion, and he was energetic in cultivating his collection, often begging his friends and correspondents to send him specimens. 

Telemann received floral gifts and advice from his good friend George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) and Johann Gottlieb Graun (1702-1771), whose beautiful trio sonatas are featured, alongside music by Telemann himself: one of his incredible "Paris Quartets", a folky trio sonata and a haunting solo flute fantasia transposed for the recorder.

Telemann declared in a letter to a friend: ‘I am insatiable where hyacinths and tulips are concerned, greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anemones’. We are therefore delighted to be able to include in this programme three floral airs by our favourite Scottish composer James Oswald (1710-1769), which capture the galant spirit of the 1750s, and present musical interpretations of three of Telemann's favourite flowers.

To order ‘A Gift for your Garden’, please head to the appropriate link at the bottom of the page.

EM Records CD074; released December 2021

Sound Engineer: Oscar Torres

After the Act of Union in 1707, ambitious Scots arrived in London in droves. Throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, Scottish music was performed and enjoyed in theatres, concerts, and in homes. This recording celebrates London-based composers who embraced Scottish musical heritage in their music.

We feature rarely recorded works by James Oswald, a Scottish composer who made London his ‘home from home’ in the 1740s. Here he set up a music shop on the Strand, where he sold his own compositions, including his Airs for the Seasons in two collections. On this disc are four of his delightful miniature airs, each named after a flower or a plant. Oswald also experimented with fusing his native Scottish tunes with the popular Italian Baroque style, resulting in his ground-breaking Sonata on Scots Tunes.

Also featured are sparkling trio sonatas by Giuseppe Sammartini, a close colleague of Oswald’s, and by their contemporary, Francesco Geminiani, who admired Scottish music so much that his Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick featured entirely his own arrangements of popular Scots tunes. 

Music by two remaining Scottish composers feature on the disc: Thomas Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kellie, a talented aristocrat whose enthusiasm for local music-making in Fife earned him the nickname ‘Fiddler Tam’, and Robert Bremner, an enterprising Scottish publisher and composer highly influential in the highly connected musical centres of Edinburgh and London.

To order ‘A Gift for your Garden’, please head to the appropriate link below.