There's nothing meek or morbid about Telemann's 'Jesu' in this passion oratorio. This is a confident muscular Jesu, closer to the Saxon Heliand than to the Man of Sorrows depicted on the CD cover; the first aria proclaims Him a hero: "Du Held… du kannst und willst mein Schutzgott sein." (You Hero… you can and will be my Protector-God.) Before that, the Siegfriedesque cantabile for horn that opens the composition sounds not so much like a lament as a call to don one's spiritual armor, and throughout the whole text Jesu is portrayed as indomitable amid the torment and agony of his followers. Specifically, He is the Lion of Judah, the model of Christian fortitude against all enemies.

Mit seinen Vier und zwanzig theils ernsthaften, theils scherzenden Oden reagierte Telemann 1741 auf die ein Jahr zuvor erschienene Sammlung des Bach-Schülers Lorenz Christoph Mizler, die einige Satzfehler aufwiesen und auch sonst nicht alle Kriterien, an denen man Odenvertonungen messen sollte, erfüllen konnten. Wie schwierig es ist, einfach, aber gehaltvoll zu komponieren, musste allerdings auch Telemann erfahren, der in seiner Vorrede bekennt, dass er die Arbeit nur „mit sehr viel Schweisse“ zuwege gebracht habe. Erhöht wurde die Schwierigkeit durch die Aufgabe, daß die Melodie zu allen Strophen passen soll.

Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.

It is not known when Handel composed his keyboard works. A number of them probably date from his youth in Germany. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow is known to have owned a large collection of German and Italian keyboard music. And French music was well known in Germany when Handel lived there. So the very fact that Handel’s suites show a wide range of influences – German, Italian and French – doesn’t necessarily mean that they were written after his stay in Italy. At the same time it is likely that some of his keyboard works were written after his arrival in England. It is suggested that some of them were used for keyboard lessons.

It was only when Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was appointed Musikdirektor in Hamburg that he started to compose a large amount of religious music. This, of course, was part of his job, but the fact that he had applied for this job is an indication that he didn't see any problem in writing music for the church and for specific occasions. It has taken a long time before the religious repertoire of Emanuel has been taken seriously, and it still doesn't belong to the core of religious music performed by today's choirs and orchestras.

Gebel, who isn’t mentioned in any of the current music encyclopedias, clearly proves–on evidence of this very fine Passion–that he was worthy of acclaim (confirmed by various contemporaty sources) and was capable of original ideas and possessed the creative resources to write music of sustained drama and interest. While this passion setting is nowhere near as powerfully affecting in either the spiritual or theatrical sense as those of Bach, it does offer consistently appealing and emotionally meaningful musical realizations, spread among numerous arias, choral movements, and chorales. Gebel also was quite adept at colorful scoring, exemplified in his fascinating combinations of instruments such as horns, oboe, bassoon, violins (often pizzicato), and theorbo (highlighted in a solo during one of the arias late in the work).

The present richly enjoyable CD contains five trios by Johann Gottlieb and Carl Heinrich. In some areas of the brothers’ work it is near enough impossible to know who wrote what with any certainty – as Grove puts it “problems of attribution, chronology and biographical detail remain”. Manuscript attributions usually refer simply to ‘Graun’.

Musica Alta Ripa was founded in 1984. The recorder player Danya Segal, two violinists Anne Röhrig and Ursula Bundies, cellist Juris Teichmanis, and harpsichordist Bernward Lohr, all outstanding, sought-after musicians in their fields, joined forces to form an ensemble that owes its special aura to the commingling of their individual personalities.

Francesco Manfredini was born in the austerely beautiful Tuscan town of Pistoia in 1684, a year before Bach, Handel and Scarlatti; he died as maestro di capella there in 1762. In the interim, he studied at Bologna with Torelli and later worked in Ferrara. He published relatively few sets of sonatas and concertos, and six oratorios, composed between 1719 and 1728, remain in manuscript. His 12 Concertos, Op. 3, were published in Bologna, a great musical centre in those days, in 1718, and were preceded by 12 Concertini, Op. 1, and 12 Sinfonie da chiesa, Op. 2. The Op. 3 Concertos are lively works, though less brilliant than Vivaldi’s similar pieces and lacking the nobility of Corelli’s sonatas and concertos. The final concerto of Op. 3 contains a ‘Pastorale per il Santissimo Natale’ which is Manfredini’s best-known work.

Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758) was a forward-looking musician who, though a contemporary of Bach, anticipated Haydn and Mozart in the classical style of his compositions. In his younger years he held several positions before he became the music director for the chapel at the court in Zerbst, where he remained for 36 years. He also enjoyed a close connection with Dresden musicians, chiefly with the concertmaster of the Dresden court orchestra, Pisendel. These works are thought to have been some of Fasch's many compositions for the famous orchestra at Dresden.

If you asked a music-lover in Haydn or Mozart's time about the works of Bach, you would have been referring to CPE, and not his dad, the great JS, whose reputation was merely that of a great organist and sometime composer of "historical" music. Not only was CPE universally admired in his lifetime, he also wrote the definitive treatise on contemporary keyboard technique (it's still in use today), collected fine art, and left a superb body of music to future generations. The symphonies are really exciting pieces full of unpredictable turns of phrase and a genuinely passionate emotional expression. These excellent performances make the best possible case for them.

This disc brings together four sacred cantatas by composers who only infrequently feature in these pages. Best known of them is Georg Anton Benda, brother of the celebrated violinist Franz, who served Frederick the Great for over half-a-century. Georg Benda made a name for himself with his Singspiels and innovative melodramas, which made a deep impression on Mozart. There is nothing innovative about either of the two cantatas with instruments performed here, though from an expressive standpoint they are far from being run-of-the-mill. Both belong to a cycle prepared in 1761 while Benda was Music Director at the Court of Gotha.

These lively, idiomatic and sometimes witty performances show CPE Bach’s harpsichord songs, early precursors of the Romantic Lied, to be far more than museum pieces, from the Three Different Attempts at a Single Song for Hexameters through to a Fantasy in C minor with Hamlet’s Monologue.

Dass Georg Philipp Telemann durch seinen schier unerschöpflichen Einfallsreichtum immer wieder für Überraschungen gut ist, haben wir auf cpo schon oft bewiesen. Auch die jetzige Veröffentlichung zeigt wieder seine Originalität jenseits aller eingefahrenen Gleise. Wir veröffentlichen drei wunderschöne Kantaten aus Telemanns Frankfurter Zeit um 1720: »Sehet an die Exempel der Alten«, »Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe« und »lch halte aber dafür«.

Georg Philipp Telemann's late work is almost inexhaustible in terms of surprises. How many times have I written this and yet I am not yet embarrassed to proclaim it again. With which creative power the 80 year old opens new worlds of expression at the end of the 18th century, one can only be astonished by his last oratorios. One of the very last - from 1761 - is his Easter oratorio "Die Auferstehung" (not to be confused with the "Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu", 1760). There is no longer a rigid sequence of recitatives and arias: flexible, almost through-composed, the music follows the strong affects of the (excellent) libretto, always in search of unconventional means of expression, such as a dramatic accompaniment, accompanied only by a highly virtuosic solo violin becomes. Or the beginning of the words: "Du tiefe, tote, grauenvolle Stille" …