As one of the three canticles from the New Testament, the Magnificat – the Canticle of Mary – has at all times held a prominent position in church music. Telemann’s setting of Luther’s German translation of the text bears eloquent witness both to the composer’s rich imagination and to his ability to mold a variety of musical shapes into a coherent formal Baroque architecture. Four solo movements with colorfully contrasting instrumentation are juxtaposed with four emphatically homogeneous choral ...