Tempesta di Mare plays Praetorious and Bach

For most of the modern era, artists have tended to feel alienated from the ordinary life of their society. Ives was a spectacular exception — a successful businessman who founded his own company and developed innovative forms of insurance. He even went in for sports during his school days, serving as captain of his high school baseball team and playing varsity football at Yale.

Most of the Baroque composers were just as immersed in the daily life of their societies and just as hopelessly bourgeois. Bach was a professional musician who spent most of his life as a busy church music director, leading choirs, creating music for the liturgical year, producing secular concerts, teaching, playing at weddings and funerals, and rearing the big family he accumulated in the course of two marriages. He didn’t engage in trade, but he might have been interested in Ives’s estate planning services.

Marking milestones

At the Ives concert, that blend of the common and the cosmic could be heard in the long “Concord” piano sonata, with its lovely tribute to domesticity in the slow movement devoted to the Alcotts and the grander movements devoted to Emerson and Thoreau. The songs Dawn Upshaw sang mixed boyhood enthusiasm for circus parades with soberer texts like Keats’s ruminations on mortality. At the Tempest di Mare event, the two moods were inherent in the basic conception — five cantatas that dealt with milestones like birthdays, weddings, funerals, and the passage of the year.

The text for Bach’s birthday cantata for Prince Leopold of Cöthen is a standard bit of praise for the local ruler (and Bach’s employer during the years he was a court music director at Cöthen), but Bach’s music transforms the text into a charming celebration with a universal appeal. Four of the five arias include dance forms, and Bach added a personal touch by writing most of the arias for a bass — the prince’s own vocal range. By the time the cantata ended, I even found myself thinking Leopold sounded like a good guy.

The wedding cantata on the program came with a text that seems even more remote to modern ears. Johann Rosenmüller composed it in 1646 for an aristocratic wedding in Leipzig, and it’s a typical example of the Baroque fascination with Greek mythology. Four Greek deities bless the happy couple with appropriate gifts. The most bizarre gift (at least to a modern sensibility) is presented by Mars, who promises the groom a nice war so he can win glory and advance his military career.

Again, the musical setting adds qualities that transform the literary conventions of the period into a time-spanning celebration. Rosenmüller decorates the text with a bouncy, cheerful buoyancy and a refrain that includes a happy interplay among the four voices. In the Mars section, he creates a lively martial atmosphere with a rhythm and drive that makes the violins sound like military instruments.

Looking at the big picture

A Bach funeral cantata and two odes to the new year by Michael Praetorius added the darker notes that placed the festive cantatas in a larger framework. The funeral cantata was a reminder that our preindustrial ancestors lived in a world where it was easy to see death as a relief from conditions that would make most moderns scream for mercy if they were forced to live in the past. The new year pieces mingled the traditional hope for a blessed new year with prayers for the forgiveness of sin and relief from war and other dangers.

The four members of the quartet were all experienced early music singers. I would have preferred that soprano Laura Heimes had put a little more power into the softer parts and a little less in the big notes, but overall the four vocalists addressed their scores with verve and understanding. The warm, intimate sound of the Baroque instruments surrounded them with courtly grace and produced a blend of voices and instruments that is one of the chief virtues of period instrument concerts.