A Gift for your Garden: Telemann, Handel, Graun, Oswald in Bloomington, MN

One may feel some surprise here that this
BIS
release appeared in December at the end of 2024, for it would make an ideal gift item for a gardener. Perhaps the idea was to get it on store shelves around the time of seed ordering. The album features more or less garden-related pieces, including lovely selections from the Airs for the Seasons, a large collection of 96 pieces, all with the names of flowers and some of them lightly folk-flavored, by the Scottish composer
James Oswald
(1710-1769). These are unfailingly melodic but are rarely played, perhaps due to the problem of avoiding monotony in presenting a sequence of miniatures, however individually interesting. The novel solution by the historically oriented
Ensemble Hesperi
, themselves of Scottish origin, is to intersperse the
Oswald
pieces among works by
Telemann
,
Handel
, and
Johann Gottlieb Graun
(brother to
Carl Heinrich Graun
). There is nothing specifically flower or garden related about these pieces in themselves, but the connection is that
, in addition to his prodigiously large compositional output, found time to maintain a good-sized garden in Hamburg and even to write down notes about its operation. From these, one can learn what he grew and also that he was in the habit of asking his correspondents, including
and
Graun
, to send him plant cuttings. This may seem a slender reed on which to hang a program, but actually, the music fits together well.
cultivates (so to speak) a laid-back style that contrasts with the glittering approach to Baroque chamber music so common these days and the whole program feels like a natural, lightly thematic evening of a sort one might have heard in London at the time. So one should get a copy for the gardener in one's life! ~ James Manheim