Festive arias, cantatas, and instrumental works by J. S. Bach, his students, and family members will spread seasonal joy at the ensemble’s upcoming concerts in Worcester and Old South Church, Boston. For details on the December 13^th and 14^th concerts click HERE

The phrase “The Musicians of the Old Post Road” resonates  for anybody who grew up in New England several decades ago or indeed has been reading Rick Atkinson’s three-volume history of the American Revolution or watching Ken Burns’s TV series.

For the sake of younger folks, the ensemble explains that its primary performing venues, mostly historical churches and museums, “trace the route of the old Boston Post Road, the first thoroughfare connecting Boston and New York City beginning in the 1670s.”

This latest of the musicians’ eight CDs (click HERE to order) was partially funded by five music lovers named in the booklet and by a Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. The result is utterly lovely, and I’m glad (and a bit ashamed) to be getting to know the group for the first time!

The pieces are all little known—some have been edited and published by the ensemble for the first time—and by German Baroque composers: Christoph Graupner (court composer at Darmstadt, one of whose operas was splendidly recorded by the Boston Early Music Festival), the famous Georg Philipp Telemann (with whom Graupner became friendly and whose music he copied for performance), Graupner’s student Johann Friedrich Fasch, and Graupner’s patron, Landgrave (Count) Ernest Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was highly trained in music (rather like Frederick the Great of Prussia).

The seven pieces (including four by Graupner) are full of surprises. For example, Graupner’s Sonata in G Major (ca. 1741) is for flute (or other high instrument, such as a violin), harpsichord (a fully written out part), plus a separate continuo part for whatever instrument or instruments—e.g., cello, large lute, or a second harpsichord—were available to emphasize the bass line and perhaps add some chordal notes above it.

The musicians here are Suzanne Stumpf (playing a delectable wooden flute), violinists/violists Sarah Darling, Jesse Irons, and Marcia Cassidy, cellist Daniel Ryan (cello), and guest harpsichordist Benjamin Katz. All are alert to shifts in the music’s moods, and to each other’s phrasing, intonation, attack, and light touches of vibrato. The CD is varied enough to be listened to from end to end with continuous pleasure and frequent surprise.

The recording was made in Granoff Music Center (Tufts University) a year after performances in the Worcester Historical Museum and Boston’s Old South Church. If you choose to listen on, say, Spotify, you can download the informative and musically insightful booklet-essay (by the ensemble’s flutist and cellist) HERE. The essay rightly draws attention to such notable features as a “cuckoo”-like two-note figure in the Graupner Trio Sonata in B minor (ca. 1744) or Graupner’s unpredictable harmonic progressions.

Even more striking, I’d say, are the surprising harmonic twists in Ernest Louis’s Chaconne (from his Symphonie no. 1 in A Major, first published in 1718), sounding to me more like some of the often-idiosyncratic music of C. P. E. Bach written several decades later. We hear only this one movement, leading me to wonder what kind of “symphonie” this work is—perhaps really an Italianate overture in three short movements, though intended for concert use and not to precede an opera? I hope that the Musicians of the Old Post Road will let us hear more music by this musically skillful count. And more Graupner, Fasch, and Telemann, too!

Ralph P. Locke is Emeritus Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. He has published two books on music and the exotic (Cambridge University Press) and edits the book series Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press). Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music.