NEXT CONCERT

March 31 and April 1

On March 31 and April 1, 2007, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare will assemble over fifty artists at the Irvine Auditorium in Philadelphia and Marshall Auditorium at Haverford College to perform Hoshanna! Hebrew Music of the High Baroque, featuring long-lost, eighteenth-century works for soloists, chorus and orchestra, composed in Hebrew in the styles of Handel and Haydn for Jewish communities in Italy and The Netherlands. This music is an expression of an extraordinary intersection of Jewish ceremony and Western art music during the Enlightenment, an era of peace and curiosity among cultures.

The music of Hoshanna! is not just rare and wonderful; it’s practically unique. The program's centerpiece, Elyon, Melits u-Mastin (God, Defender & Accuser), is an anonymous Vivaldi-style oratorio for three soloists, chorus and orchestra composed for the Italian Ashkenazik synagogue of Casale Monferrato in 1733. Another featured work is C.G. Lidarti's Kol Haneshama for solo soprano and orchestra, a virtuosic setting of Psalm 150 reminiscent of Mozart's famous Exsultate Jubilate, and commissioned for the Sephardic community of Amsterdam ca. 1770. Both works will receive their U.S. premieres in Hoshanna!.

Flutist Gwyn Roberts, lutenist Richard Stone and violinist Emlyn Ngai will lead Tempesta di Mare's celebrated 20-piece baroque orchestra of brass, woodwinds, strings, lute and harpsichord. Vocal soloists are Yiddish operetta star Nell Snaidas, soprano, Metropolitan Opera National Council winner and local cantor Sheryl Heather Cohen, soprano, and acclaimed Bach specialist David Newman, bass. The 30-voice Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Thomas Lloyd, Director, will provide the choral forces.

Dr. Israel Adler, discoverer of Elyon, Melits u-Mastin, will speak about the social and religious contexts that gave rise to these extraordinary works one hour prior to each performance. Adler, founder of the Jewish Music Research Center at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, is the world's preeminent authority on the modern rediscovery of early Jewish musical culture. Tempesta di Mare has worked closely with Adler and the JMRC in preparing this program.

Hoshanna! is supported in part by The Philadelphia Music Project, an Artistic Initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by The University of the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and The University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies. Tempesta di Mare is an Ensemble in Residence at Haverford College, thanks to the John B. Hurford Humanities Center.

Tickets available here, at www.tempestadimare.org or call 215-755-8776.

Tempesta di Mare - Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
Gwyn Roberts & Richard Stone, Artistic Directors
Emlyn Ngai, Concertmaster

Hoshanna!: Hebrew Music of the High Baroque
Venues

All 2006-2007 series concerts, including the free-admission "Open Doors" concerts, require a ticket or Season Pass. You can get these online, by phone, fax, mail or at the door. For more information, go to tempestadimare.org or call 215-755-8776.

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Table of contents:

•  Next Concert: Hoshanna!: Hebrew Music of the High Baroque
•  Profile: Nell Snaidas, soprano
•  Feature Article: The Rarest of the Rare: Jewish High Baroque
•  Profile: Sheryl Heather Cohen, soprano & cantor
•  Profile: Eve Miller, cellist
•  Concert Program: Hoshanna!
•  Venues Listing
•  Tickets
•  Season Passes
•  Become a Supporter
•  “Open Doors” Concerts
•  Program Advertising
•  Volunteer

FEATURE ARTICLE (continued)

“When you sing,” she says, “you fall in love with the music you sing and you want to sing it as beautifully as possible. You want to be connected to the text, you want to become that character.”

Falling in love with the music has made her a quick student. The Spanish-speaking daughter of an Uruguayan father, she applied to New York’s Repertorio Español while studying opera at Mannes College of Music. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for her to find out that you’re not really bilingual until you can follow dance directions in both languages. “It was like going to another country. The other performers were so psyched to be in a place where they didn’t have to speak English. I really learned.”

She’s not afraid to take her connection with characters out on a limb, either. For a while, she was a member of Rhoda Levine’s Play It By Ear, a troupe of musicians in Soho who improvise like comedians, only with opera. They take ideas from the audience and make up a scene on the spot, complete with music. Snaidas still does “improv” when she works with school groups. She talks about ornamentation and improvisation in early music, asks a kid what their day was like, and then improvs an aria about their experience over a passacaglia.

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FEATURE ARTICLE (continued)

But Sephardic song was something that connected with her on a very personal level. “It’s like when you hear something and you think, this is the music of my heart. I’d write little songs in my head when I was a kid, and it sounded like that. When I heard it, I thought, ‘that’s mine.’” In the Gerard Edery Ensemble, she sings in more than seven languages but mostly Ladino (a Jewish language based on Spanish and Hebrew), Hebrew and Spanish.

Sephardic song, zarzuela, opera, Broadway, Baroque music, they all have that characteristic of connection and engagement.

“Baroque music, well, what’s more over the top than Baroque music?” asks Snaidas. “And it’s not even about being over the top. It’s about cutting through that wall and connecting with your character and having the audience understand the story and the music. It’s just about embodying the whole thing.”

“And wherever that takes me, if it’s something cool, I’ll do it,” says Nell Snaidas.

In Tempesta’s show, Snaidas plays the figure God judging humankind in the 18th-century Hebrew oratorio, God, Accuser, and Defender (Elyon, Melits, u-Mastin).

Want to know what she was doing last summer? Workshopping Mel Brooks’s new Broadway musical, Young Frankenstein.

Young Frankenstein and Old Testament.

Yup, that’s cool.

Anne Schuster Hunter, Contributing Editor, is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia.

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