Telemann: Pimpinone
Baroque orchestra of St Lukes
Rudolph Palmer
This is a strange piece. It was written as a comic intermezzo between the acts of Telemann’s adaptation of Handel’s Tamerlano in Hamburg. As seems to have be the practice there for such pieces it has a libretto which is partly in German and partly in Italian. The musical material is fairly lightweight and though it is attractive there is little here which is memorable. Quite a lot of the peice seemed to involve the two characters using funny voices and nonsense words - that might be quite entertaining on stage but it becomes very tiresome on disc. I don’t think that I have heard any Telemann before (at least not consciously) and this opera didn’t really tempt me to explore any more of his vast output.
