Telemann - Fantasias

The Guardian 60

Aisha Orazbayeva
(PRAH)

This was never going to be a straight-up rendition of Georg Philipp Telemann’s baroque fantasias, not when the performer in question is Aisha Orazbayeva. The London-based Kazakh violinist specialises in fearless, confrontational ventures into postwar modernism and the avant-garde of now; unsurprising, then, that her account of Telemann’s 1735 pieces takes the fantasy name at face value and totally reimagines them, fixating on a lonely wisp here or a nasty scrape there. When she does come round to playing the originals (she includes six of the 12 fantasies), they sound impossibly pristine and delicate – precious things lost and self-consciously glittering in a scraggy, broken landscape. Orazbayeva first used these Telemann deconstructions for a 2015 Tanztheater Wuppertal dance piece by Tim Etchells called In Terms of Time, which the Guardian noted in a review for its “absurdist ritual and truncated communication”. I would say the same description applies here.