Around the horn

The concert began with a flourish and a honk. Well, of course it did. Telemann wrote his last Ouverture-Suite in F major for the Landgrave of Darmstadt. The Landgrave loved hunting, and in the 18th century hunting meant horns. And horns mean honks. If you’ve ever played the horn — applied 12 feet of coiled metal tube to your face and tried, through a combination of lip muscles and willpower, to make the damn thing sing — you’ll know that no amount of hoping, praying or practice can prevent the occasional squawk. The two excellent players in Florilegium’s concert at St John’s Smith Square, moreover, were using 18th century-style horns — without the valves and additional plumbing that render the modern beast just about controllable. With a whole evening of Telemann ahead, they got their honk out of the way early, and it sounded glorious.

Because — let’s not pretend otherwise —Telemann does need a bit of roughing-up. Two-hundred-and-fifty years after his death, his reputation is still that of a worthy, over-prolific purveyor of musical muesli. But how does that square with the bewigged old gent with lively eyes who smiles from the engraved portrait in the programme book? Dig deeper, and he comes alive: his kindness to younger musicians, his love of tulips, the courage with which he bore the early death of one wife and the ruinous cruelty of a second, and above all the little miracle that this anniversary concert — part of the London Festival of Baroque Music — set out to celebrate. ‘Baroque at the Edge’ was the festival’s theme, and in chronological terms alone it was on the money. The Ouverture-Suite dates from 1766, by which time Mozart had written his first symphony and Haydn was already working for the Esterhazys.