The set of “Entractes” that we’ll premiere in our Fire and Invention orchestral program—October 14, 8pm, at the Kimmel Center—come thanks to Dr. Steven Zohn’s detective work and his generosity.
Six of the pieces in our set are previously-unknown Telemann contained from a compilation by the then-Dresden concertmaster and Telemann’s chum, Johann Georg Pisendel (1678–1755), of orchestral vignettes by various composers. The bit that was hidden in plain sight—and that Steve figured out—was that Pisendel identified the composers with the initial of the composers’ last name. The pieces with a T are by Telemann. There are many more than six “T” pieces in Pisendel’s collection that have Telemann concordances elsewhere, but six of them turned out to be unique to Pisendel’s album.
Some of these “new” Telemann appeared without any attribution in other Pisendel compilations as part of an anonymous suite that had even more movements not previously known to be by Telemann, but which sound plausibly like Telemann. So we have included these others in our Entractes set too. Steve generously pointed us to these pieces during the planning stages of Telemann 360°. He’ll play them with us too, which we’re so excited about!
One last item of the Entractes set is a movement that has two initials: TP. It’s a violin solo by Telemann that appears in his self-publication, Der Getreue Musik-Meister that Pisendel orchestrated.
All the pieces are completely charming, and some of them rise to remarkable. We created our own performing edition—and the images for this post—from photos of the original partbooks held at the library of the Saxon State University Library (SLUB).
