Sixth
Season
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2007-2008
Series The brilliance and drama of baroque music continues in Philadelphia and Swarthmore with Tempesta di Mare’s Greater Philadelphia Concert Series, now in its sixth season. The series opens on October 19 and 20 with Force Majeure, an orchestral perspective on nature unleashed. The full, 20-piece orchestra of baroque winds, strings and continuo shines the spotlight on the Paris theater, with Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Elements as the headline act. In it, primal chaos erupts—with a shock unrivaled until Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring two centuries later—before coalescing into the ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water. Also on Force Majeure are a suite from the opera Alcyone by Marin Marais, with its stunning depiction of a raging storm, and Jean-Marie Leclair’s sizzling Violin Concerto, with Concertmaster Emlyn Ngai as soloist. Performances take place October 19 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Swarthmore and October 20 at St. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia. This December, take a break from the holiday hustle and bustle for an evening of soprano Clara Rottsolk singing cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti in Ain’t Love Grand, with the Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players. Center stage goes to Scarlatti—Handel’s greatest influence—and to love’s turmoil in a program that ranges from heart-on-sleeve to take-no-prisoners. Amid the Weltschmerz, Naples-style, expect one of Scarlatti’s beautiful solo cantatas for Christmas. Tempesta di Mare Co-Director Richard Stone recently returned from Germany, having hand-copied several programs’ worth of wonderful, all new-to-modern-ears music from the original manuscripts. You’ll hear these discoveries in two programs, the first of which comes up in January’s Rescued by the Red Army. In this program, we introduce Johann Gottlieb Janitsch and the chamber music he was famous for, including recent rediscoveries for various combinations of woodwinds, strings and harpsichord. Our season’s centerpiece will feature two baroque musical dramas—fully staged with life-size puppets—in March’s No Strings Attached: love and death with music and puppets. Soprano Marguerite Krull and baritone David Newman make return appearances, and are joined by the new tenor sensation Aaron Sheehan in his Tempesta debut. With music by Monteverdi and Handel, this collaboration with master puppeteer Doug Roysdon and his Mock Turtle Marionette Theater is sure to sell out, so reserve your tickets soon for one of the three performances at Plays and Players Theatre. Audience response to last season’s standing-room-only all-Fasch performances left no doubt in anybody’s mind that we need to hear more of this wonderful baroque maverick. We wind up the series in May with the more of Stone’s finds from Germany, this time orchestral music by Johann Friedrich Fasch in the program Fresh Fasch. The all-modern-premieres performances will coincide not only with Fasch’s 250th anniversary year, but also with the release of our third Chandos disc, recorded live in concert at last season’s The Fantastic Herr Fasch. Season Passes available below. Single tickets available at the Series page of our website for each performance. For more information, go to tempestadimare.org or call 215-755-8776 today. go to Contents |
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Table of contents
Concert information go to Top of Page |
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David
Walters, Audio Engineer Put Tempesta di Mare’s new Chandos CD, Flaming Rose: Handel’s German Arias, on the stereo or in your iPod. Go ahead. Put your feet up. It’s beautiful. There’s Julianne Baird’s effortless soprano twining with Gwyn Roberts’s limpid flute on the song “Süsse Stille” (Sweet Silence), and lucky you, it sounds like you’re sitting in the best seat in the best house in the world. For that, thank David Walters, Flaming Rose’s recording engineer. Together with Rachel Smith, producer, Walters was responsible for bringing all the best parts of live performance to a commercial CD. Take the performance space, for instance. Projects like Flaming Rose aren’t recorded in a sound booth like those scenes in the movies when the singer belts her song into a mike over prerecorded instrumental tracks while the engineers smile and nod from the other side of the glass. Flaming Rose was recorded in a real room, Marshall Auditorium at Haverford College. “The hall provides a specific signature,” says Walters. “You may not be so aware of the venue as an audience member, but the hall affects how your ears and especially how the mechanism of the microphones translate the sound. The interaction the hall provides for the instruments has a lot to do with the magic of a spontaneous performance.” (feature continues below)
FEATURE ARTICLE (continued)
Different halls bring different kinds of sound to the recording palette. A room with wide lateral walls provides more sound reflection into the mikes, “secondary reflections,” while a more enclosed room produces an intimate, close-miked sound. Engineers and producers pick the best hall for the needs of individual projects, choosing halls that balance the lushness of the sound—its “bloom” and reflections—with clarity. “Some artists and producers like to record rich polyphonic music like Bach or even a single violin in a huge cathedral space,” says Walters, “so that the sound morphs into a seductive kind of musical sludge. Other performers prefer a clean and uncluttered sound, almost like performing in an echo-free chamber with no secondary reflections coming back to color the direct sound at all. These are very personal aesthetic choices.” “Tempesta wants the best of both worlds in their recordings.” Walters says. “They like an overall spacious soundscape combined with a secure sense of where each sound is placed. They like the blend of one homogenous whole but also a sense of all the excitement and clarity of the individual performances.” Which is why Tempesta moved to Haverford College for several days in March 2006. Century-old timber-and-plaster construction, a deep stage, and the unique acoustic throw from the balcony give an open quality of sound in Marshall Auditorium. But the room acoustics also provide the kind of clarity and definition that is crucial to Flaming Rose. Because the arias are more ensemble-driven than a strict singer-plus-accompaniment situation, recording made particular demands in terms of clarity and balance. “The violin or flute enters into an equal partnership or conversation with the voice and you have to be able to hear the continuo, too,” says Gwyn Roberts, Tempesta di Mare Artistic Co-Director. “David paid such careful attention to balance at all times. Sometimes it was just a matter of asking a person to take one tiny step towards the microphone while another person pointed his instrument at a slightly different angle, but it made all the difference.” Making sure that Julianne Baird’s vocals shine through the mix was equally important. Baird is famous for the eloquence of her diction, and Flaming Rose shows it to spectacular effect. Her singing revels in the sounds of the words “rose” and “bloom” and “shimmering waves.” “Julianne sings the poetry with such nuance and joy that of course we have to be able to hear her as clearly as possible,” says Roberts. “We're really happy with the results.” “Every aria in this set is so different in its conception and character,” says Walters, “that we gave each one its own special audio set-up. Julianne was always the anchor, though. For her voice, I chose to use large diaphragm tube microphones from another German, George Neumann of Berlin. German mikes, German arias—a compatible coincidence! I wanted to impart a vintage quality, a rounded, contoured sound to the production.” (feature continues below)
FEATURE ARTICLE (continued)
Walters, whose enthusiasm for his work is infectious, comes from a strong musical background, having studied music with English literature in college. It was while he was training for a piano career in Vienna that Walters’ other talents were recognized by a teacher who alerted him to the Tonmeister (a master sound engineer and recordings producer) program at the Universtität der Künste, Berlin. “Producing and engineering is just right for me, working with musicians as peers and continually learning from more knowledgeable musicians,” says Walters. He has been a sound engineer and producer now for twenty years, ten years with his own company, David Walters Classical Music Productions. He is producing Tempesta’s next Chandos CD of Fasch orchestral premieres. Walters also produces Tempesta’s live radio broadcasts, a job which requires coping with such audio nuisances as traffic sounds, fire alarms, air handler noise, creaking chairs, and kicked music stands. New technology is a mixed blessing, he says. Extraneous noise and a ravishing Emlyn Ngai violin solo are both captured with the same, amazing high resolution. But technology provides its own compensations. Did you ever wonder how they get rid of coughs? “Coughs used to be a very difficult problem,” says Walters. “The event itself has several different components. All kinds of strange reverb tails drift away in different regions of the frequency spectrum during a cough. And unfortunately, it’s usually a lengthy disturbance—several seconds, an eternity for earlier processing algorithms. But coughs are about 95% fixable now, thanks to recent DSP software developments. You can visually represent the cough on screen, see its various components relating to the other audio surrounding it, gate the unwanted disturbances, and let the software program target those specific areas for removal. You are able to work on that specific element only and leave everything else in the spectrum alone.” Now you know.
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