Performing Arts : Recordings

TELEMANN: “Water Music,” “Alster” Overture, Concerto (“The Frogs”)

New London Consort, Philip Pickett, conductor

Decca

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It figured that some other prolific composer of Handel’s time would have composed a competing “Water Music,” but Telemann’s half-hour work--otherwise known as an Overture in C--remains relatively obscure. Written for the centenary of the Hamburg Admiralty a few years after Handel’s “Water Music,” it is an invigorating piece of work, consisting of an Overture and nine dance movements with various watery descriptions from mythology that the listener can take or leave.

Pickett’s period-instrument band offers a rambunctious performance; the furious strumming harpsichord effects in “Triton at Play” actually suggest the sound of rushing water.

In “The Frogs,” the repeated drone effects of playing the same note simultaneously on one open string and one stopped string is supposed to represent amphibian croaking, but that requires a real stretch of the imagination. Pickett caps this program of aquatic Telemann with the “Alster” Overture that offers the most believably descriptive music of the disc--from carillons and rustic village band music to a hilariously dissonant conclave of frogs and crows. The New London Consort attacks the latter with particular relish.