Suites & Concerto

The impressively rich instrumental legacy of Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most prominent German composers of the late Baroque era, was a complement to the main area of his activity, which was church and opera music. The composer found great satisfaction in running collegium musicum associations, popular in Germany. They were groups of people interested in making music together, most often recruited from the academic youth and the bourgeois 'middle class.' Telemann founded his first collegium in 1702 in Leipzig, where he studied law. At the same time, he significantly transformed the traditional status of such institutions, which so far had been aimed at making music in their own group. Telemann quickly made the collegium musicum an institution organizing more or less regular public concerts in municipal halls, cafes, merchant social clubs, and aca-demic auditoriums; the collegium musicum would also support church ensembles on more important occasions. Telemann continued his co-operation with student collegia throughout his compositional activity, also in Frankfurt and Hamburg, zealously creating new pieces for them. On the present release, the Altberg Ensemble presents a selection of Telemann's Suites and Concertos.