Bach Consort Leipzig: |The Day of Judgement

Georg Philipp Telemann made use of all aspects of tone painting when he composed the music to the poetic text Der Tag des Gerichts in 1761. The graphic descriptions of nature in Christian Wilhelm Alers’ libretto were ideal for Telemann’s colourful compositional style. The result were four musical paintings which the Bach Consort Leipzig, with soloists Siri Karoline Thornhill, Susanne Krumbiegel, Tobias Hunger, and Gotthold Schwarz, and the exceptional instrumentalists retrace on this CD. When Telemann composed his Tag des Gerichts, he was already marked by the signs of age. The eighty-year-old was plagued by a similar fate that his colleague Johann Sebastian Bach had suffered. He himself complained about his ‘stupid eyes’, meaning no less than that he was almost blind. In the daytime, Telemann taught at the Johanneum and provided Hamburg’s main churches with liturgical music; in the evenings, he composed by dim candlelight, which worsened his eyesight more and more. His will to creativity was nevertheless unbroken until the end, especially since a new performance opportunity had opened up with the newly inaugurated concert hall ‘auf dem Kamp’ in 1761. The concert hall was a small sensation, for it was the first in Hamburg that could actually be used.