The Mixed Concerto

  • Fri, May 21 (Chestnut Hill)
  • Sat, May 22 (Center City)

Tempesta di Mare’s season-long survey of J.S. Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concertos—alongside the music that inspired and surrounded them—concludes on May 21 and 22 with The Mixed Concerto, featuring Brandenburgs 4 and 6, plus music by Telemann and Dall’Abaco, including a regional premiere.

Brandenburg 4 features a pair of solo recorders and string orchestra that do their best to keep pace with a spectacularly unhinged solo violin. Brandenburg 6, a chamber concerto for six soloists and continuo, is another one of Bach's “social commentary” pieces in which violas take on the star role traditionally reserved for violins while the iconically aristocratic gambas take on the violas’ customary supporting role.

Two works by Georg Philipp Telemann and a concerto for orchestra by Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco round out the program. Telemann’s Double Concerto in E Minor for flute and violin is one of the composer’s trademark tours-de-force in the Italian style, with elaborate and exciting interplay between the two solo instruments. His Orchestral Suite in G Minor, which receives its regional premiere on our series, is one of a set of six that were recently rediscovered in the Russian State Library in Moscow. Ever creative, Telemann includes character pieces entitled Napolitaine, Harliquinade and Mourky (a trendy style of the 1730s with a continuously octave-jumping bassline) alongside such standard French-style suite components as an overture and a pair of minuets.

Italian-born Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco wrote his Opus 5 Concerti a più istrumenti while serving as concertmaster at the court of Munich. We perform his spectacular concerto for an orchestra of two flutes and strings, with a dramatic middle movement that alternates between a “Presto,” which has the violins churning out sixteenth notes cement-mixer-style, and lyrical Adagios for the flutes.

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Program Details

Table of contents

• Next: The Mixed Concerto
• Program: works performed
• When and Where: Venues, Times
• Tickets: for The Mixed Concerto


• Feature: Serious Fun: Dr. Zohn on Telemann
• 2010-2011 Season Pass: for a limited time at 2007 prices
• News: New CD on Chandos
• Party: First Friday CD Release Party in Old City

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Early Bird Sale

Season Pass Early Bird for $125
  All five concerts at 2007 prices!

Be there for...

• live-in-concert recording of Fasch orchestral works for Chandos;
• sopranos Laura Heimes and Clara Rottsolk.
• J.S. Bach’s First Orchestral Suite in C;
• plus Couperin, Telemann, Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti, Zelenka, Rebel, Hasse and others;

Get your 2010–2011 Season Pass at 2007 prices and be part of Tempesta di Mare’s live-in-concert recording of large-scale orchestral works by Bach-contemporary Johann Friedrich Fasch. We will record a second all-premieres Fasch CD over three concerts next season for international release on Chandos, “bringing Fasch’s glorious sounds to life at the cutting edge of the re-discovery of his output” (Early Music Review, UK). Also in 2010–2011, we will bring you an all-Couperin program, have a Tempesta-first-go at J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite in C, and we will be joined by two of Philadelphia’s hottest sopranos: Clara Rottsolk in December’s Roman Nights program and Laurie Heimes in May’s blood-and-guts dramatic cantata Ino, by Telemann.

A Tempesta di Mare Season Pass is a bundle of good things rolled into one:

• Preferred seating at all 5 concerts
• No waiting in line — you go directly to your seats
• 2 fabulous locations to choose from : Philadelphia & Chestnut Hill
• Exclusive ticket exchange privileges
• Invitations and free admission to pre-concert talks, receptions and special events

Get your Season Pass now for only $125! (Offer good through June 30.) Use the order form below.

Serious Fun

The Brandenburg season finale! Trust Tempesta to save the best for last, Brandenburgs numbers 4 and 6. (They’re my favorites.)

And what could be better to share the finale than some splendid Telemann? It was only icing on the cake for Tempesta to be able to invite Steven Zohn to speak before the concert. Zohn, a Philadelphian (Associate Professor of Music History at Temple University) and author of the first full-length scholarly study of Telemann to appear in English, Music for a Mixed Taste (Oxford, 2008), probably knows more about Telemann than anybody else on earth. And it’s a pleasure to meet a man who so enjoys his work.

Being the preeminent authority on Telemann is good these days. Telemann’s reputation is in full recovery after centuries of obscurity. (For the strange tale of how a composer considered to be Europe’s best in his lifetime fell out of grace, see this link to our September 2008 interview with Steven Zohn.)

The rising momentum of interest is bringing all sorts of new information to light, adding more detail to the present-day picture of one of the Baroque era’s most complicated figures. In a recent interview, Zohn talked about Telemann’s Suite in G minor, which will receive one of its first modern performances in the upcoming show, and how new scholarship is changing his understanding of the piece.

The new discovery of printed instrumental parts in Moscow allow scholars to reunite a set of six suites, including the G minor, originally published by Telemann in 1736 but broken up and partially lost in modern times. Overture suites such as these—a formal French overture followed by dance movements—seem to be among Telemann’s favorite genres. He wrote over one hundred of them, some with colorful or topical titles such as La Bourse (about a stock market crash!) or Bizarre. Orchestral suites were falling out of fashion by the 1740’s, however, and this set may be the last that Telemann wrote, more-or-less. Seeing all six together now, Zohn finds that they provide new insight into this important eighteenth-century form.

(FEATURE continues below)

FEATURE (continued)

“They’re almost like an historical look back through this genre,” Zohn says about the set that includes the G minor. “and I’m delighted that Tempesta di Mare is bringing this music to Philadelphia audiences, along with the fine concerto for flute and violin. I think Telemann is one of the few composers at the time—and Bach is the only other I can think of—who is concerned with things like that. When Bach publishes a collection of music, he’s looked at every possible angle, as with the Goldberg variations. For Telemann, among the forty-two movements in the whole set of six suites, he hardly duplicates any dance forms: there’s only one sarabande, one courante, one gigue, and so on.” It’s as if it were a summation of an era in his career.

And if this is Telemann’s overture-suite swan song, he stamped it with his unique imprint. He’d worked in a Polish court as a young man and fell in love with rustic sounds he heard in the villages: the irregular rhythms, abrupt dissonances, unusual tonal shifts. “Unlike Bach and pretty much every other eighteenth-century composer, Telemann uses the Polish style as a main aspect of his language. He’ll work it into everything, into a song, an aria, a sacred cantata, everything,” says Zohn.

He explains how Telemann, with his keen ear for aural color and respect for cultural resonance, worked these stylistic elements into the G minor suite in ways that expands its meaning beyond genres. “It starts out with a very serious French overture, then ends with a sort of comic dance, a harlequin dance. It’s as if he’s creating a dialogue between sophisticated, courtly dances and more earthy things.”

“I like how he ends with this little harlequinade,” he says. “It’s the only overtly comic dance in the whole forty-two movements of the set. For me, this is almost as if Telemann puts Harlequin’s costume on, jumps up on stage and gives the audience a wink. ‘Don’t take this too seriously,’” says Steven Zohn as Georg Philip Telemann. “‘All this is just fun.’”

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

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