Soliloquy: An act of speaking your thoughts aloud, oblivious to any listeners. For acclaimed Australian recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey, Telemann’s twelve Fantasias for solo flute have long had an intensely personal connection. As a teenager she was obsessed with a famous recording by the legendary Frans Bruggen, and performed the first fantasia of the set at her cousin’s funeral - the only thing she could think of to ease all that family pain.
Genevieve never learned the other eleven; the first was too tightly wound with grief for her to imagine a relationship with any of the others. But years later when she was ready to return to this beloved music, inspiration struck, and she decided to devote herself to learning one fantasia a month throughout 2017. Over the course of that year, these fantasias became like a personal diary for Genevieve. An acutely personal and isolated process became a soliloquy - a series of moments out of time, out of earshot, diving ever deeper into sound, into memory, dream, and wonder.
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) was acclaimed in his day as the best composer in Germany - greater even than his contemporary, JS Bach. An absolute master of all the established musical forms of his day, both sacred and secular, Telemann was also a trailblazer with a seemingly inexhaustible imagination. His Fantasias for solo flute proved for the first time that this was an instrument able to weave from its single line of melody a vast harmonic tapestry, full of colour and emotion. Genevieve’s performances reveal equally gorgeous and surprising colours on the recorder.
