Seventh Season

Newsletter
January–February 2009

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With Cheerful Hearts
odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow

Tempesta di Mare joins forces for the first time with The Philadelphia Singers, one of the region’s finest vocal ensembles, to perform With Cheerful Hearts: Odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow. The works on the program span an emotional range from unbridled joy to heartfelt loss, all glorious testaments to music’s power to convey our deepest emotions. Performances of With Cheerful Hearts will be held on Saturday, January 31 at 8:00 pm, and Sunday, February 1, at 3:00 pm at Old St Joseph’s Church, 321 Willings Alley (4th Street between Walnut and Locust Streets) in Philadelphia. Tickets are $20, $30 and $40. Full-time students are $10 and children ages 8-18 are free. Tickets may be purchased by calling 215-755-8776 or online at tempestadimare.org.

The major works on the program are Johann Sebastian Bach’s profound lament, Trauer Ode, and the modern world premiere of John Blow’s festive ode for New Year’s Day 1690, With Cheerful Hearts, both secular works. The Trauer Ode is one of Bach’s greatest cantatas and also among the least performed. Blow’s joyful With Cheerful Hearts was composed for the royal couple William and Mary. The other works: Vivaldi’s stunning Magnificat and the Concerto Grosso in B-flat for lute, flute, violin, viola da gamba, cello and strings by Silvius Leopold Weiss. Tempesta di Mare’s 20-piece orchestra will be matched by 20 voices from The Philadelphia Singers Chamber Chorus, with soloists drawn from the chorus.

While The Philadelphia Singers usually performs with a conductor, this concert will be led instead from within the orchestra by Tempesta di Mare’s concertmaster and continuo, as was the practice when this music was new. David Hayes, Music Director of The Philadelphia Singers, will be heavily involved in the preparation of the program, but he and Tempesta di Mare Artistic Co-Directors, Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, decided that it was important to uphold the original esthetic.

Hayes says, “We are excited to work together to craft the interpretation. The beauty of this collaboration is that it is a chance for us to learn together.”

This concert is funded in part by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through the Philadelphia Music Project, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Founded in 1972 by Michael Korn, The Philadelphia Singers is now under the dynamic leadership of Music Director and Conductor David Hayes. For 36 years, The Philadelphia Singers has upheld its mission to enrich the broader community through embodying the highest standards of classical musicianship and providing a platform for its musicians to serve the community in a variety of formats. In the 2008-2009 Season, The Philadelphia Singers will present a four-concert subscription series. The Philadelphia Singers also performs regularly with leading national and local performing arts organizations including: the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Kimmel Center Presents and The Mannes Orchestra. In 2001, The Philadelphia Singers Chorale was named Resident Chorus of The Philadelphia Orchestra, the first time in the orchestra’s history that a chorus has received this distinction. Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch, Conductor Laureate of The Philadelphia Orchestra, hails The Singers as “one of the musical treasures of Philadelphia.”

Representing “the perfect marriage between musical instinct and meticulous scholarship” (Fanfare), Tempesta di Mare is named for Vivaldi’s exciting concerto meaning “storm at sea,” a title reflecting the power of music to evoke drama. Led by Artistic Co-Directors Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone with Concertmaster Emlyn Ngai, Tempesta is one of just three baroque orchestras across the country to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Excellence award in 2007. Tempesta di Mare’s recent CD release on Chandos, a live-concert recording of orchestral music by Fasch, has earned five stars from Goldberg Magazine. It followed the acclaimed Flaming Rose, Handel’s German arias with soprano Julianne Baird, and the world-premiere recording of lute concerti by Silvius Leopold Weiss.

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Program
 With Cheerful Hearts
odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow
January 31 and February 1

Tempesta di Mare | Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
The Philadelphia Singers | Chorus and Soloists

With Cheerful Hearts*
Ode for New Year’s Day, 1690
  soloists, chorus, orchestra 		John Blow
(1649–1708)
Magnificat, RV 610
  soloists, chorus, orchestra 		Antonio Vivaldi
(1678–1741)
INTERMISSION
Concerto Grosso in B-flat, SC 57
  lute flute, violin, viola da gamba, cello, strings 		Silvius Leopold Weiss
(1687–1750)
Trauer Ode, BWV 198
  soloists, chorus, orchestra 		Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685–1750)
* modern premiere

Click to order tickets online, or call 215-755-8776.

Dates, Times, Locations & Tickets

Saturday, January 31, 8 pm
Old St Joseph’s Church
321 Willings Alley (4th & Walnut)
Center City
(Chestnut Hill Series)
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Sunday, February 1, 3 pm
Old St Joseph’s Church
321 Willings Alley (4th & Walnut)
Center City
(Center City Series)
get tickets

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Ulrike YEAR-END

2008 Year-End Appeal
a message from Ulrike Shapiro, Managing Director

Help keep Tempesta going strong.

On behalf of the musicians, board and staff, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in Tempesta di Mare and to invite you to join the growing family of contributors who have voted with their checkbooks to help sustain Tempesta. Once you do, you can take pride in knowing that you have done your part to keep the music you enjoy going strong.

Your financial support is especially important today. Small arts organizations like Tempesta di Mare are among the most vulnerable during economic downturns. Grant awards in our field are reduced or not renewed at all after many years of support. In this climate, individual supporters take on even more importance than usual, and we are especially grateful for any gift received this year.

Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra I ask you please to consider a gift to Tempesta di Mare. As a token of our appreciation, we will send you a limited-edition concert recording for a gift of $100 or more, and invitations to special events throughout the year for a pledge of just $50. Use the online form to make your tax-deductible pledge.

Thank you for your support, and may your coming year be filled with happiness, good health and more beautiful music.

Sincerely,

Ulrike Shapiro
Managing Director


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Gwyn and Richard

INTERVIEW

Cheers
for
Bach and Blow
Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone
talk about
“With Cheerful Hearts”

“We planned this show so we’d get to play the John Blow New Year’s ode, ‘With Cheerful Hearts,’” says Richard Stone.

“Wait a minute,” says Gwyn Roberts, “didn’t we plan this show to play the Bach Trauer Ode?”

“Oh right, yes, that too,” says Stone, and laughs. With a John Blow ode that’s a modern premiere and some Bach that’s very rarely performed, the upcoming concert clearly pleases Roberts and Stone, Tempesta di Mare’s Artistic Co-directors. They finish each other’s sentences, joke around and generally enjoy themselves.

“The Bach is just fantastic,” says Roberts. “It’s ravishing.” Bach’s instrumentation provides a deeply elegiac mood: transverse flutes and violas da gamba, soft instruments that represented mourning to Bach and to which he added a pair of lutes and two oboes d’amore (low pitched oboes). “Dark. A very dark sound,” Roberts says.

Bach wrote the Trauer Ode—as Roberts says, “a St John Passion in miniature, only secular,”—at the top of his form, just months after completing the St Matthew Passion. A memorial on the death of a local heroine, the performance was a very big deal for the city of Leipzig and for Bach. “The hall was jammed with princes and potentates with Bach himself playing keyboard in the orchestra,” says Stone. “During the procession, great bells tolled, and Bach writes the tolling bells into the piece…”

“…all across the orchestra, every single instrument takes up the bells’ ringing…” says Roberts.

“…like you’re passing through the street and the sound of the bells comes and goes,” says Stone. “Very cool.”

But they’re already up and running about the show’s other centerpiece, seventeenth-century English composer John Blow’s “With Cheerful Hearts.” Talking about Bach and the nearly-forgotten Blow in the same breath doesn’t faze Roberts and Stone in the least. Modern reputation or lack thereof has become almost meaningless to them, delighting as they do in pulling lost gems out of the dust of history. There is just too much good stuff out there to worry about who’s famous and why.

(INTERVIEW continues below)

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TICKETS

With Cheerful Hearts
odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow
January 31 and February 1

Tempesta di Mare | Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
The Philadelphia Singers | Chorus and Soloists

Click the ticket roll image above to order your seats today.

INTERVIEW (continued)

“I love Blow, and the program fell into place because the Bach and the Blow have instrumentation that’s compatible,” says Roberts. Two generations earlier and as sunny as the Bach is somber, the Blow New Year’s ode is another example of a wonderful composer at his best.

Recent reappraisal moves Blow out of famous Henry Purcell’s shadow and into the limelight. Roberts describes the two as friendly competitors who one-upped each other into greater efforts during an amazingly fertile period in English music.

“What I love, as a wind player, is how distinctively they write for my instruments,” she says. Virtuoso recorder was a French import to England in Blow’s time, something new for him explore. “Blow doesn’t use the recorder like he’d use a violin. Instead, he provides music specific to the instrument’s color.”

In her opinion, Blow pioneered a truly English Baroque idiom. “Blow and Purcell always make me very aware that their music comes from people who speak English,” says Roberts. “German and Italian poetic phrases tend to end on weak syllables, while English ones end strong. Think of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. That characteristic English rhythm affects musical accent patterns, phrasing, the shape of the musical line, everything.”

“This music by Blow is giddy fun,” says Stone. “He seemed determined to be unpredictable in his writing: unusual phrase lengths, unexpected dissonances…”

“…and those English texts!” says Roberts. “One of the ‘Cheerful Hearts’ choruses wishes a new year ‘free from disease, from disease, disease and pain, free from disease and pain!’ It’s almost funny in a way it wouldn’t be if it were sung in Italian.”

“This is a wonderful show,” says Stone. “Good, substantial secular pieces talking about worldly things. Don’t you love it when they start listing rivers in the Trauer Ode along which they’re honoring the dead princess? ‘The Vistula, the Dniester…’”

“‘The Warta…’”

“‘…The Elbe and the Mulde.’” They savor the words (note the weak syllables!), laugh and go on talking about musical cheer that crosses centuries.

Cheerful hearts.

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

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