During his lifetime, Georg Philipp Telemann was immensely popular and astonishingly productive, and outshone his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach both in princely courts and in cities. But later, over time, the latter’s immense and complex genius cast the former’s clever and cheerful art into oblivion. The two composers, in fact, knew and respected each other. One can ask whether it is really necessary, now, to rank them so rigidly, especially when what is at stake is the pleasure their music provides… This concert proposes a friendly confrontation between the two. For Gilles Cantagrel they are like Moses and his brother Aaron: “two indissociable and complementary faces of musical creation.”
In granting to Johann Sebastian Bach—in his day known as the relatively obscure cantor of the Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig—the glory that his contemporaries attributed to Georg PhilippTelemann—who was lionized throughout Europe—we consider that we, today, have corrected an historic wrong. It gives us pleasure to believe that, in reversing the judgement of the men and women of the 18th century, we righted an historic wrong.
