A Gift for your Garden

The Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most prolific composers of all time, created a much-envied garden later in life at his Hamburg residence. Always searching for new and unusual specimens, he wrote on many occasions to his good friend Handel in London, asking for plants from England. “I am insatiable”, he wrote, “where hyacinths and tulips are concerned, greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anemones.” In London, the Scottish composer James Oswald was also no stranger to the mid-eighteenth-century craze for plants. His illustrious patron, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Augusta, curated an impressive collection of exotic plants at Kew Palace, now Kew Botanical Gardens, which may very well have been Oswald’s inspiration for his “Airs for the Seasons”. This programme presents a cornucopia of music by Telemann and his horticultural correspondents, framed by charming airs by Oswald depicting Telemann’s own floral favourites.