Baroque+ Day: Ensemble Hesperi

Event details

Mary-Jannet Leith  recorders
Magdalena Loth-Hill  baroque violin
Florence Petit  baroque cello
Thomas Allery  harpsichord

A Gift for your Garden

Join Ensemble Hesperi for a celebration of eighteenth-century horticultural gift-giving through the music of the Baroque composer Telemann and his friends. This programme presents a cornucopia of music by Telemann himself – a sonata from his Paris Quartets, a folky trio sonata and a virtuosic solo fantasia – and two pieces by friends from whom he begged specimens for his Hamburg garden: Johann Gottlieb Graun and none other than Handel himself. Telemann's love of plants in later life neared obsession, as he admitted to a friend: 'I am insatiable where hyacinths and tulips are concerned, greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anemones'.

In London, the Scottish composer James Oswald was no stranger to the mid-eighteenth-century floral craze, publishing two collections of 'Airs for the Seasons'. His airs depicting Telemann's favourites frame the programme. A Gift for your Garden was released on BIS Records in 2024 and was featured as album of the week on BBC Radio 3's Essential Classics.