Pondering the Baroque violin repertoire, one would be forgiven to think of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works and little else. Acclaimed English violinist Thomas Bowes courageously sets out to change this preconceived notion with TELEMANN FANTASIAS, a rare and remarkable full performance of all of Georg Philipp Telemann’s solo violin fantasias. Telemann is to violinists what Mozart is to keyboard players: deceptively simple on paper, notoriously difficult to master in actuality. Bowes, never a stranger to a challenging repertoire, expertly articulates the cheer, spirit, and zest of these pieces with a strikingly light-hearted panache, as if it could be no different. Indeed, upon listening to this rendition, it is easy to imagine a future in which public performances of Bach’s pious partitas are habitually rounded off by Telemann’s buoyant secular fantasias. For Bowes, this future is now.
