Tempesta di Mare's Bach with alterations

Baroque composers felt no compunction about performing major surgery when they adapted scores to new circumstances. Tempesta di Mare took advantage of that attitude Sunday, changing keys and even adding new material as its musicians saw fit while presenting chamber music arrangements of six Bach organ pieces.

None of the arrangements on the program replicated an actual historical performance. But they captured the customs and the freewheeling spirit of the culture that gave us Bach's music.

The six organ pieces Tempesta performed on Sunday were all trio sonatas— a Baroque chamber music form that normally requires four instruments. A trio sonata teams two treble lines with an accompaniment called a continuo and the continuo usually employs two instruments.

Bach, the multi-tasker

At most modern performances, the continuo is played by a cellist (who plays the bass line) and a harpsichordist (who doubles the bass line and fills in the harmonies). The Baroque gave us the only trio that creates jobs for four musicians—a small gift to our 21st Century economies.

Bach composed his organ trio sonatas for a single multi-tasking musician. The organist's feet play the bass line on the pedals while his hands play the treble line and the harpsichord part. Tempesta arranged the sonatas for an instrumental ensemble but they didn't stick to the standard four-instrument setup. Baroque musicians created variations on the basic configuration and Tempesta followed their lead.

The concert opened with six musicians bursting into an arrangement that transformed Bach's fifth sonata into a work that sounded like a piece for a full orchestra. Emlyn Ngai and Gwyn Roberts took the melody lines on violin and recorder; violinist Karina Fox enhanced the texture with a viola; and Richard Stone reinforced the continuo, as he usually does, by adding his lute to Lisa Terry's cello and Adam Pearl's harpsichord.


The addition of the viola was a common Baroque practice. Tempesta's arrangement included a lovely interlude in which the continuo instruments dropped out and the viola played the bass line alone at a higher pitch— a Baroque practice called bassetto.

Plucking party

Tempesta followed the sextet with the smallest combination on the program— a duet version of the fourth sonata arranged for lute and harpsichord. Both instruments can play several notes simultaneously, so each musician played a melody line and an independent bass line.

Despite their similarity, these two plucked instruments produced appealing contrasts. The lute tends to be mellow and reflective; the harpsichord likes to ripple.

Tempesta's arrangements for three other sonatas adhered to standard practice and matched the continuo with treble lines played by two violins or a violin and a recorder. For the finale, the entire company returned to the stage and presented an arrangement of the sixth sonata that turned it into a concerto for sopranino recorder.

Sure-fire formula

How do you transform a sonata into a concerto? According to Tempesta's program notes, you start with the solos that Bach wrote for the treble instruments. You give all the solos to the sopranino, let the other instruments take on the role of the orchestra, create some new material to strengthen the extra violin part, and poof—the sopranino has a new concerto.

The sopranino should be a shrill instrument, given its ultra-high pitch, but it's actually the sweetest member of the recorder family. In Gwyn Roberts's hands, it resembled a cheerful human whistler engaging in elaborate exchanges with the other musicians.

These organ sonatas aren't as lively as Bach's Brandenburg concertos, nor do they touch the grand heights and emotional depths he reached in his religious works. There's some evidence, in fact, that they may have been composed as practice pieces for Bach's son, Wilhelm Friedemann. But they're well worth playing, and the instrumental adaptations added color and warmth, along with an edifying display of scholarship and musical creativity.