Georg Philipp Telemann
Work: Trumpet Concerto in D-major (1714)
Mov.I: Adagio 00:00
Mov.II: Allegro 01:59
Mov.III: Grave 04:00
Mov.IV: Allegro 05:43
Trumpet: Niklas Eklund
Orchestra: Drottningholms Barockensemble
Conductor: Nils-Erik Sparf
Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto for trumpet, two violins and basso continuo has the traditional four-movement form of the Baroque church sonata, a slow movement leading to a fast, followed by a further slow movement and a fast final movement. In the first movement the melody is entrusted to the trumpet, with a more equable share of melodic material in the second and fourth movements.
A full manuscript score has been handed down to posterity by the collector J. S. Endler, who made a complete copy of it. O. Bill of the Hesse County and University Library suggests that the score would have been written about 1720, when Endler was active in Leipzig, or at least before he moved to Darmstadt in 1723. In his own first autobiography, written in 1718, Telemann says that he wrote several concerti during his stay at the court of Eisenach, from 1708 to 1712, but continued writing for Eisenach while he was employed at Frankfurt-am-Main and during the first ten years of his residence in Harnburg.
It might, therefore, be conjectured that the present concerto was written for Eisenach, as the stylistically similar Concerto for trumpet, two oboes and basso continuo. The soloist was almost certainly Nikolaus Schreck, who was employed at Eisenach between 1710 and 1716 and after that until his death at Gotha, where he was described as concert trumpeter. It would seem that Telernann’s concerto is the first such composition in Germany.