A Gift for your Garden

Join Ensemble Hesperi for a celebration of eighteenth-century horticultural gift-giving through the music of Telemann and his colleagues. Telemann, one of the most prolific composers of all time, had a much-envied garden attached to his Hamburg residence, on which he lavished loving attention. Always searching for new and unusual specimens, he wrote on many occasions to his good friend Handel in London, asking for plants from England. “I am insatiable”, he wrote, “where hyacinths and tulips are concerned, greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anemones.” In his own time, Telemann’s garden was so famous that in 1742 a list of his plants was collated and has survived to the present day. In London, the Scottish composer, James Oswald, was also no stranger to the mid-eighteenth-century craze for plants, publishing two collections of “Airs for the Seasons”, each named after a flower or plant. His illustrious patron, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Augusta, had an impressive collection of exotic plants at Kew Palace, now Kew Gardens. Our programme presents a cornucopia of music by Telemann and his horticultural correspondents: a sonata from his Paris Quartets, a folky trio sonata, and two virtuosic solo fantasias, alongside trio sonatas by Handel and Graun, framed by charming airs by Oswald depicting the plants Telemann loved best.