‘Tremendous fun!’, ‘Scintillating!’, wrote the journalists of Diapason and Classica about the most recent recording of Olivier Fortin and his ensemble, devoted to the rarely heard Romanus Weichlein, which received every honour from the French musical press (Diapason d’Or, Choc de Classica, FFFF Télérama). This year, the Canadian harpsichordist and his loyal band have decided to record Telemann, the 250th anniversary of whose death will be commemorated in 2017. Two anonymous musicians from the city of Hamburg wrote in 1728 that ‘Handel [composes] music’ but Telemann composes ‘music and affects’.

The overture-suites by Telemann presented on this recording are written in a ‘mimetic’ style: Les Nations, the Concerto Polonois, La Bizarre and the Burlesque de Quixotte explore a vast range of subjects and, even more than all his other works, reveal a man of the theatre, widely read, curious, a humorist and a shrewd observer of the physical and political world around him.