Telemann sonatas freshly played; Bandy, violin and Cienniwa, harpsichord
German Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) was one of music’s great mavericks, an aesthete with a restless mind and cosmopolitan tastes. During his nearly seven-decade career, he sampled every conceivable genre, idiom, and national style, and incorporated a dizzying number of them into his music.
The Violin Sonatas of 1715 are so wide-ranging in both idiom and expression that, heard together, they constitute a microcosm of Telemann’s art. Other recordings of these works often include cello. These pieces, however, were written specifically for the duo instruments — just violin and harpsichord. In this inventive presentation, Bandy and Cienniwa didn’t think of them as six individual pieces, but a single big piece with 24 movements.
The Sonata in F sharp minor is a real rarity and this may be its world premiere recording. Unpublished in his lifetime, the manuscript is signed as George Melante, a nearly-anagrammatic pseudonym.
Comparing the seven works on this recording, it is clear that Telemann had no simple schema, no formula that would produce a single piece of music over and over. These are seven truly distinct sonatas: each unique, daring, and extraordinary in its own way.
Recorded in high-resolution at WGBH Studio, Boston, the album is offered on CD, high-resolution and conventional downloads and streaming services.
With a repertoire spanning 400 years and six instruments, Dorian Komanoff Bandy is one of the most versatile talents to emerge on the early music scene. His “spectacular violin playing” (PlanetHugill), marked by “sensibility and virtuosity” (Musical Pointers), has charmed audiences in venues ranging from London’s Wigmore and Cadogan Halls to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and New York’s Symphony Space. For four years he was leader and co-director of Musica Poetica (London); he is now a frequent guest concertmaster/soloist with the Rococo Consort, Sinfonia New York, the Amphion Consort (London), Musical Offering (Boston), and other groups across Europe and North America. Dorian holds degrees from London’s Royal Academy of Music and Cornell University, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Glasgow. In 2010 he was awarded the coveted Marshall Scholarship.
Cited by the Huffington Post for his “inner sense of creative flow, fueled by an abundance of musical imagination and desire,” harpsichordist Paul Cienniwa has an active career as a soloist, ensemble player, recording artist, and teacher. In 2017 he began as Director of Music Ministries at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach, FL. Prior to that, he was music director at First Church in Boston; Chorus Master of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra; and served on the faculties of the Music School of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, Framingham State University, and UMass-Dartmouth. He was awarded the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in harpsichord from Yale University in 2003. This is Paul's third recording for Whaling City Sound.
Founded in 1999, Whaling City Sound was established to provide the musical audience with a bit of our abundance of outstanding musicians. We strive for innovative musicianship and impeccable recording quality; a platform for our artists to be heard and enjoyed by a wider audience.
