Royal Recorder Concertos: Music from the Court of King Frederik IV

Gramophone AW 2013, Lindsay Kemp

There have been CDs of ‘Danish’ Baroque orchestral repertoire before, notably from Concerto Copenhagen, but there’s certainly room for more. I put ‘Danish’ in inverted commas because none of these composers of ‘Music from the Court of King Frederik IV’ (actually from that of his son Christian VI as well) was actually Danish, and only one of them, Johann Adolph Scheibe, worked in Denmark. Mind you, most of the repertoire of the 18th-century Danish court perished long ago in a succession of fires, so it is reasonable to include works by Graupner and JH Graun, who were both popular there, while the Schickhardt recorder sonata whose third movement is offered at the end, seemingly as a taster for a future disc (the whole sonata can be downloaded from Dacapo), was dedicated to Frederik. Læs mere.