Featured Album January 2025: Ensemble Hesperi "A Gift For Your Garden"
For the first Featured Album of 2025, we're looking towards the spring with Ensemble Hesperi's new album "A Gift For Your Garden". Released in December on BIS Records, Telemann's love of horticulture is in the spotlight for this charming collection of baroque masterpieces from the London-based quartet.
A Gift For Your Garden
Ensemble Hesperi
OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR JANUARY 2025
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From the artist's press release:
Countless wealthy people in eighteenth-century Europe developed a passion for botany. This passion went far beyond the simple pleasure of gardens, reflecting rather a growing fascination with the natural world. German composer Georg Philipp Telemann shared this passion and energetically cultivated his collection, often begging friends and correspondents to send him specimens. The creative landscape of Telemann’s life was undoubtedly filled with floral and musical colour.
Ensemble Hesperi, a period ensemble based in London, presents a programme that celebrates Telemann’s botanical passion. His published correspondence shows that he often wrote to his musician friends abroad, asking them to send him plant specimens. Among these friends were George Frideric Handel and Johann Gottlieb Graun, each of whom is represented here by a trio sonata, and there is also music by Telemann himself: one of his difficult ‘Paris Quartets’, a raucous sonata in G minor and a haunting fantasia for solo recorder.
In a letter to a friend, Telemann spoke of his passion for hyacinths, tulips, ranunculi ‘and especially for anemones’. The composer of four instrumental collections containing floral musical miniatures, James Oswald had to be part of this programme, and so we are treated to ‘The Hyacinth’, ‘The Anemone’ and ‘The Tulip’ from his ‘Airs for the Spring’.
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Why The Early Music Shop loves "A Gift For Your Garden":
“A Gift for your Garden” is the eagerly-awaited second album from London-based period specialists Ensemble Hesperi, and their first for the renowned Swedish label BIS. Building on the success of their previous release “Full of the Highland Humours” (2021), this time the ensemble turns to a botanical theme to tie together this impressive collection.
The programme is inspired by Georg Philip Telemann, but not in the way you might think. His love of horticulture is in the spotlight, with complimentary music from composers including Händel and Oswald tied into the theme of flowers and nature.
Without wishing to discredit the other musicians, recorder player Mary-Jannet Leith’s solo recorder interpretation of Telemann’s Fantasia No. 9 (TWV 40:10) is one highlight of the disc. While she performs much of the album on a rich-sounding voice flute (tenor recorder in D), the brighter sound of her alto during this piece offers a chance to appreciate her virtuosity in exposed detail.
Meanwhile, in the album’s closing trio sonata, Telemann’s TWV 42:g9 in G minor, the interplay between the recorder and Magdalena Loth-Hill’s expressive violin is highly engaging, taking into account the composer’s inspiration from traditional Polish melodies. Indeed, Leith describes in her insightful programme note how Telemann considered the two top lines to be of equal importance, and the closeness of ensemble brings the album to a rousing climax.
Throughout this engaging programme, the harpsichord accompaniment from Thomas Allery is tasteful and stylish, and his Alan Gotto instrument has a warm sound which is captured well in the recording, without ever being intrusive. Joining him in the continuo role is Florence Petit, whose resonant cello playing is a huge asset to the group. Cleverly, the selected pieces by James Oswald, taken from his Airs for the Spring, highlight a range of flowers including the anemone, hyacinth and tulip; these performances are spirited, characterfully Scottish, and full of growth and energy.
The care in programming and presenting this music is evident, as is the passion that these four musicians have for their themes and performance. With Ensemble Hesperi’s new partnership with BIS Records helping them to reach new ears, this is the next chapter in a career which will surely continue to blossom and flower.
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A Gift For Your Garden is available from The Early Music Shop online or in our Snape Maltings showroom.
Click here to order now!
Click below to watch a behind-the-scenes look at the recording of Ensemble Hesperi's A Gift For Your Garden: