Telemagnetism: Tabea Debus at Dr Johnson’s House
Album launch of XXIV Fantasie per il flauto
Tabea Debus
Dr Johnson’s House
unreserved seating
10 April 2018
Eventbrite page
The launch of this interesting project – new works commissioned to complement each of Telemann’s 24 mini fantasies for flute, performed by the fantastically named recorder player Tabea Debus – allowed me to do three things: spend some time in Dr Johnson’s House, which despite shoulding have I have never; reacquaint myself with the wonderful strangeness of the recorder; and try once again to convince my brain to let go the hurt of grade 5 violin and accept that Telemann really is a terrific composer. In short, all good things.
It’s very cool that Dr Johnson’s House still exists, and nestled as it is amid slightly horrid modern buildings it feels like even more of a precious survivor. The attic, as well as being pleasingly Georgian, possibly the place in which the dictionary was written, and current host to a first edition of said, also has an acoustic very well suited to solo recorder playing. Debus is a virtuoso and the attic gave just echo for the sparer Telemann to sound majestic rather than stifled, and enough dryness that every note over a very wide range was distinctly articulated.
The 12 of the 24 Debus selected to perform live provided a gaudy wealth evidencing Telemann’s talent and wit. These are astonishing little pieces, perhaps made more astonishing when rendered in the unearthly ghostliness of the recorder. My favourite was the Largo from no.8, a piece punctuated by gaping crevasse-like intervals spanning determinedly peculiar harmonies; Debus may have played up its oddness to suit the context of this project but even on the page I’m sure this is a piece of a decidedly singular character, a quality shared to some degree by each Telemann performed.
It might be inevitable that when juxtaposed with these miniature masterpieces the newly commissioned works seem somewhat dilettantish. After all, Telemann just had to write some cool pieces in a familiar idiom, a far easier job than finding a way to respond to a genius doing his own thing three centuries earlier. I enjoyed Max de Warrener use of two recorders played at the same time, and the atmosphere generated by Arne Gieshoff and Ronald Corp; Alastair Penman incorporated some saxophone techniques to expand even further Debus’s palette of colour. Otherwise I could only revel in the Telemann, and generally lament the paucity of female composers in a project that drew together 24 current writers.
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