Ho-ho-ho-hum! or rather ho! Here we have (it says) a Baroque Christmas program. Well, it's an interesting--even an unusual--Baroque program, and Christmas is okay in its place, which, for me on a sticky August evening, is some remote hamlet in the Tyrol. Where I have my reservations is how this qualifies as a Christmas program.
There's no real doubt about the Telemann cantatas, of course. Their application--one for the First Sunday in Advent, the other for the First Sunday after Christmas--is on target if not precisely in the bullseye. Telemann wrote a vast number of attractive solo cantatas, and I don't believe that either of these has previously been available on record here. Grove's calls his cantatas "innumerable" but it looks here as though someone has at last got around to bringing order out of chaos by cataloging them. No 72, the one about the real Christian being like an eagle, is sung by Johannes Hofflin, an attractive lyric tenor who has recorded a good deal of Schutz, among other Baroque things. I don't know Erika Ruggeberg who does the cradle-watch cantata (No. 65), though German LP's have been full of singing and conducting Ruggebergs' for well over a decade.
Nor will I quibble about Johan David Heinichen's Pastorale for oboi d'amore. Such piped pastorales are "shepherd-music" and the Christmas connection-frequently intentional--is not far to seek. In attention fact, is it's aid rather stable. Not much attention is paid Heinichen these days, though he was a Somebody in his time. A
lawyer, he caught on as a musician at the Court of Zeitz. But operatic success went to his head, -and he went to Italy. where sometime later he met the Elector of Saxony and was appointed court conductor for opera and church music in Dresden. There he spent the rest of his life, turning out reams of music, none of which was published, which may tell us something. What did get published, however, was his treatise on thorough-bass, which was for years the standard work on the subject.
The concerto by Evaristo Felice Dall' Abaco is, however, another matter. It is a so-called church-concerto for strings, which A.J.B. Hutchings (The Baroque Concerto) dismisses as no real concerto. So far as I can ascertain it contains no pastoral or siciliana, and the Christmas application remains mysterious. Dall' Abaco was a Veronese, by the way, who understandably gave up his job in Modena for one at the Bavarian Court in Munich, where he lived happily ever after, publishing six opuses of sonatas and concerti. He is also notable for being the first name in the Schwann Catalog, though he may some day be dislodged by Erkki Aaltonen or Pietro Aaron.
As for the Marcello concerto, perhaps the oboe qualifies it as Christmassy, for I can find nothing else to suggest that it is. It is often played (and recorded) in C minor under the name of Benedetto Marcello, and Bach once transcribed it for cembalo apparently under the impression it was by Vivaldi, all of which has created great confusion. A collection of concerti published in the second decade of the 18th century by Jeanne Roger, however, clearly specifies it as Alessandro’s. Alessandro was Benedetto's older brother, noted as a mathematician and philosopher. He was a member of the Arcadian Academy, dedicated to promoting the notion of the pastoral poet Jacopo Sannaczaro, and his music was published under his Arcadian name "Eterio Stinfalico." He was no slouch either!
But who am I to challenge an orchestra of German professors? After all, the Germans practically invented Christmas!
