Tempesta di Mare, Café et Catastrophe

There was a time, in the 17th century, when Europeans saw coffee as a mood-changing brew that seemed just as revolutionary as LSD and Prozac. In his 2004 historical thriller The Coffee Trader, David Liss portrays a Jewish refugee who downs revitalizing doses of the new drink as he becomes involved in a scheme to corner the coffee market in 1659 Amsterdam. Coffee created new social institutions, such as coffeehouses and coffee klatches, and played a major role in the development of financial instruments like options. The traditional European social drink, wine, decreased alertness and judgment. Coffee stimulated thought and financial chicanery.

A 1703 ode with a modern sound

Bach’s Coffee Cantata is the most famous musical response to coffee’s effect on European culture, but it isn’t the only one. Tempesta di Mare opened their latest exploration of French Baroque music with a 1703 ode to coffee by a Parisian composer, Nicolas Bernier. Bernier’s cantata has a very modern sound, praising coffee as a morning pick-me-up, an antidote to drunkenness, and a potion that lets us stay up late and enjoy some of the hours that sleep “steals from life.”

Tempesta’s guest vocalist, soprano Rosa Lamoreaux, was a prime example of a contemporary phenomenon: She has achieved a national reputation even though she’s devoted much of her career to early music. Thirty years ago that kind of career was a novelty; today it’s becoming more common.

Lamoreaux has been gifted with a particularly beautiful voice, and she hits every note without the slightest indication she’s straining. Her approach seemed a little detached and calculated for my taste, but the 18th century was, after all, a time when artifice and coolness were in vogue.

This was a chamber concert, presenting pieces that were played in Parisian salons, so Tempesta held it in the smaller meeting room in the Arch Street Friends Meeting House. Lamoreaux’s voice filled the space without overwhelming it. She underlined Bernier’s modernity by opening the cantata dressed in a loose wrap, yawning as she held up a coffee maker and prepared her morning cup. When she switched to the pleasures of the evening, she removed the wrap and finished in an evening gown embellished with a gold necklace — a simple, well chosen evocation of timeless French chic.

But seriously, folks

The other cantata on the program was a bit less festive. Thomas-Louis Bourgeois’s Phèdre et Hippolyte recounts the sad story of Theseus’s second wife. Phaedra lusts after her stepson, Hippolytus, and has him killed when he rejects her. Stricken with remorse, she commits suicide.

Bourgeois tells the story in three arias, connected by recitatives that fill in the narration. A frenzied rage aria depicts Phaedra’s reaction to Hippolytus’s rebuff; a melancholy aria laments his death; and a final bit of moralizing bemoans our subjugation to Eros and his whims.

Gwyn Roberts and Emlyn Ngai provided a flute and violin accompaniment that set scenes and evoked moods. Tempesta’s standard three-instrument ensemble provided the all-important continuo part that forms the foundation of baroque music. Lisa Terry shaped the continuo’s bass line on the viola da gamba (the older cousin of the cello), and Adam Pearl and Richard Stone filled in the harmonies on harpsichord and lute. Roberts added a notably rollicking flute part to Bernier’s caffeinated version of a drinking song. Emlyn Ngai underscored the rage aria with a furious violin display.

Got rhythm?

Two art songs and a pair of instrumental pieces filled out the program. A chaconne by Jacques Morel featured an unusual duo: Roberts’s wooden flute and Terry’s soft viola da gamba. For Jean-Féry Rebel's La Terpsicore, Stone switched to a small guitar and added a rustic twang as the piece rushed through eight highly varied dance movements without a break.

The livelier sections of La Terpsicore included one of my favorite Baroque sounds: an emphatic, heavily accented beat created by soft wind and string instruments. People raised on over amplified popular music may not believe it, but a strong beat can sound more rousing when it’s packaged in a soft, sensuous wrapper.