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 no 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”, and 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.