Down in the splendid old Meeting House at New Marlborough, Kenneth Cooper, Ben Luxon, and the Berkshire Bach Society presented an ingenious program which intrigued me. In the center of it was music which Telemann composed in connection with Swift's Gulliver's Travels
. Ben read some of the juicier sections of this strange book with his usual cheekiness and resonance. Telemann's music was played alongside it expertly on modern instruments, but with fluency and quickness, with the exception of one section illustrating the enormous keyboard that Gulliver must play. For this, Mr. Cooper encouraged his players to use one finger only to approximate the difficulty Gulliver might have had. It was hilarious. I would like very much to hear more of Telemann's music on this subject, and more baroque works which use the spoken voice.