Tempesta di Mare presents music from the court of Louis XIV

In the second half of the concert, Sheehan proved he could handle a piece that required a less intimate, more operatic approach: an aria from Charpentier’s cantata Orphée descendant aux enfers (Orpheus descending into the underworld). The program notes didn’t include a translation for the aria, but Charpentier’s music and Sheehan’s expressiveness told you everything you needed to know.

Sheehan followed the aria by joining Tempesta’s co-director, Richard Stone, in another intimate interlude: three folklike French songs for voice and the five-string Baroque guitar. Stone normally plays the lute, but he’s just as accomplished producing the slightly warmer sounds of the guitar. Louis XIV played the guitar, and his teacher may have been the same composer, Francisque Corbette, who wrote the prelude and chaconne Stone played before Sheehan joined him in the songs.

The finale was a set of selections from a Lully and Molière musical entertainment, The Bourgeois Gentleman, that ended the evening with a Spanish cheer for parties and dancing, Vaya de fiestas, vaya de baile.

The instrumental works interspersed between the vocal numbers included a small “symphony” for violins and flutes and four trios Lully composed for “la coucher du roi” — Louis XIV’s bedtime rituals. The violins played a subordinate role in this concert, but Emlyn Ngai’s instrument emitted some brief, attention-getting flashes that added little fillips to the flow of the music. The two wind players, Gwyn Roberts and Aik Shin Tan, varied the tone colors in the ensemble by switching between the Baroque flute and four types of recorders. The sweet brightness of the soprano and sopranino recorders perked up the livelier numbers, and the hollower sound of the flute and the lower-pitched recorders provided an appropriate background for the more soulful love songs.

Time travel

The historians and biographers who write about Versailles tend to ignore its musical life and concentrate on political issues, court intrigues, and the sex lives of the kings and their courtiers. I’ve been reading about Versailles and its masters since I was a teenager, and most of the writers I’ve read don’t seem to know much about music. They usually treat it as a peripheral subject.

But human beings don’t spend their whole lives in the “real world.” We also live in the emotional world created by the arts. Louis XIV and his courtiers played politics and pursued love affairs, but they also played musical instruments and immersed themselves in ballets and operas. They responded, just as we do, to the mysterious power exerted by the shape of a musical line and the experience created by works like Charpentier’s Orpheus aria. When we listen to a good approximation of the sounds they heard, we slip into that hidden, private corner of their lives and touch aspects of their personalities that can’t be preserved in the historical record.