Tempesta di Mare's tenth birthday festival

Tempesta di Mare is celebrating the end of a full decade of Baroque music-making with a ploy worthy of the Baroque functionaries who planned court entertainments built around clever fancies: Tempesta is conducting a three-concert, two-weekend festival in which all the pieces have a ten in their pedigrees.

Some works made the menu because they're labeled Opus 10. Others got the nod because they're the composer's tenth piece for a particular instrument or the tenth entry in a multi-item opus.

At the third concert, scheduled for this coming weekend in Center City and Chestnut Hill, Tempesta's Baroque orchestra will play large-scale works. The first two concerts, presented Saturday night and Sunday afternoon in Center City, focused on chamber music and solo sonatas.

The restriction to tens produced a Baroque sampler that included one acknowledged classic, several standouts and several pieces worth listening to even though they adhered to conventional Baroque patterns.

This was probably the first time anyone has ever noticed that the acknowledged classic, Bach's fourth suite for unaccompanied cello, is a double ten. It's BWV 1010 in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalog of Bach's works.

Overall, the two programs demonstrated that the Baroque repertoire is so rich and varied that you can put together two meaty, entertaining concerts even when you limit your selections with a gimmicky rule invented for a special occasion.

Violin duets

The violin came into its own in the Baroque period, and Tempesta's two lead violinists— concertmaster Emlyn Ngai and second violin Karina Fox— received some of the program's best assignments.

Saturday evening, they scored with two duets. In the first half, they played an unaccompanied sonata for two violins and spent four lively movements creating interesting sonorities and taking turns accompanying each other. In the second half, an accompanied sonata featured two bright fast movements, a dark introduction and a beautiful sarabande.

For Sunday's solo recital, Ngai presented a Vivaldi sonata that included two movements packed with the showiness that has roused violin audiences for three centuries. The third movement was one of those dreamy slow movements that are just as characteristic of Vivaldi's work as the high-speed stuff we tend to associate with his name.

Fox soloed on Sunday with an unaccompanied Fantasia that she described as one of the Telemann's attempts to create polyphony with a single-line instrument. I couldn't hear all of her on-stage introduction, but I gathered Telemann built the three movements around themes that would have been played simultaneously had he been working with two instruments. The soloist plays them one after the other instead and creates some of the effect of polyphonious, contrapuntal music. Whatever the theory, Fox breathed spirit into the exercise.

Speak up, please

I had trouble hearing most of the on-stage introductions that were provided in lieu of programs notes on Sunday. Musicians should always be provided with microphones when they speak from the stage. They've spent their lives mastering their instruments. You can't expect them to be experts at the art of projecting their voices, too.

The harpsichord, the lute and the cello played supporting roles Saturday night, as they normally do in Baroque ensemble music. Sunday afternoon, they got their turn in the spotlight.

Cellist Eve Miller turned in a solid performance of the Bach suite, even though she was playing it for the first time on the Baroque cello, after years of playing it on the modern cello.

Tempesta's co-director, Richard Stone, contributed a sonata by a Baroque lute master, Leopold Weiss, that included a long, notably beautiful sarabande. Stone's precise, poetically nuanced performance was a good example of the work that has earned him a reputation as one of today's leading lutenists.

Harpsichordist Adam Pearl presented a ten squared— Frescobaldi's 100 variations on a passacaglia theme. Despite the daunting title, the piece only lasts a few minutes. Overall, it's a beautiful example of the harpsichord's ability to sort out the different voices in a contrapuntal piece.

Forgotten composer

Tempesta's other director, Gwyn Roberts, closed both concerts in high style. On Saturday a chamber version of Vivaldi's "Goldfinch" concerto featured good-natured allegros, plenty of birdcalls, and a general evocation of the outdoors.

Sunday she presented a gem by one of her personal discoveries, Francesco Mancini, a composer who was overshadowed by Allessandro Scarlatti all his life and seems to have been relegated to the shade ever since. If his tenth recorder sonata is any indication, it's time he received his due.

It's an inventive, highly varied piece that keeps moving in unexpected directions. Mancini's imaginative writing for the cello accompaniment adds to the surprises. The cello is so prominent that at times the piece sounds like a duet.

Roberts and Stone rounded out the anniversary festivities by announcing Tempesta's schedule for next season. In addition to a full round of orchestra and chamber concerts, the itinerary includes three "Artist Recitals" at the Barnes, featuring Roberts, Stone and Pearl. This is the first time I've heard anyone mention that the new Barnes Museum on the Parkway has added a new concert venue to Philadelphia's resources.♦


To read a related commentary by Kile Smith, click here.