Newsletter
November–December 2011

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Table of contents

• Next: Leipzig Shortlist — December 3 and 4
• Composer Spotlight: Johann Christoph Graupner
• Feature: Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo: Telemann, Fasch, Graupner, Bach  — new


• Program: Leipzig Shortlist works performed
• When and Where: Venues, times
• Tickets: Single tickets for Leipzig Shortlist
• Listen: Sample from the Leipzig Shortlist program  — new


• Video: Tempesta’s YouTube channel goes live  — new
• Reviews: Critics rave about Tempesta's season opener
• New CD: Pre-order Tempesta’s newest concert album
• Award: Tempesta di Mare receives NEA grant  — new

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NEXT

December 3 and 4
Leipzig Shortlist
Telemann, Fasch, Graupner, or Bach?

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Tempesta’s December concerts are organized around four baroque masters — Telemann, Graupner, Fasch, and Bach — who were under consideration to take over the music directorship at Saint Thomas’s Church in Leipzig (right) in 1722. The program will include concertos for harpsichord, recorder and lute by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Friedrich Fasch, plus suites by Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Christoph Graupner. (Read our Composer Spotlight on Graupner below.) Performances take place on Saturday, December 3, at the Arch Street Friends Meeting at 8:00, and on Sunday, December 4, at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill at 4:00. Discounted tickets are available in advance online, by phone (215-755-8776), or by printable mail-in form. Full-price tickets are available at the door.

Today, public taste bestows demigod status upon Bach, while Telemann, Fasch, and Graupner’s reputations are just now enjoying rehabilitation. In 1722, the situation was reversed. Telemann was the committee’s top choice, followed by Graupner and Fasch. One by one, the three declined or withdrew themselves from consideration, as did several now-forgotten composers further down the shortlist. Bach, the committee’s bottom choice, was the one who got the job, by virtue of being the last man standing. There’s no accounting for taste, ours or theirs.

The works on this concert display not only four distinct musical personalities, but also an across-the-board level of craft that makes compelling arguments in favor of hiring any of these composers. Adam Pearl will perform Bach’s rarely heard Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor. Two more concertos come from the pen of Fasch, with Gwyn Roberts performing his dazzling, recently discovered Recorder Concerto, and Richard Stone performing his snarly Lute Concerto. From Graupner we’ll perform a dizzying Suite for Strings, and we’ll represent Telemann with his epic 12th Paris Quartet, a prize of a chamber suite for flute, violin, cello, and continuo. It promises to be a great program — a shortlist audition 289 years in the making.

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PROGRAM

Leipzig Shortlist
Telemann, Fasch, Graupner, or Bach?

December 3 & 4

Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players
Gwyn Roberts, flute and recorder• Emlyn Ngai and Karina Fox, violin
Daniela Giulia Pierson, viola • Eve Miller, cello • Anne Peterson, bass
Richard Stone, lute • Adam Pearl, harpsichord

see below for tickets

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COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT

Christoph Graupner

by Richard Stone

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One of the top contenders in the 1722 job search for the Leipzig music directorship which inspired Tempesta's December concert, Johann Christoph Graupner was born in 1683 into a family in the fabric and garment trades. He studied music in his home town of Kirchberg, a city in Saxony equidistant to the Saxon capital Dresden and the university town of Leipzig. At 13, he was admitted to the choir school of Saint Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, where he studied music with Johann Kuhnau — the music director whose death in 1722 created the vacancy for which Graupner and the other composers on Tempesta’s Leipzig Shortlist program became candidates.

Graupner remained in Leipzig after his music studies to study law at the town’s famed university. Despite this shift, Graupner continued his involvement with music during his university years, striking up a friendship with Georg Philipp Telemann, who directed a collegium musicum (a public concert society for professionals and amateurs) in town.

Graupner eventually settled in Darmstadt as court music director for Ernst Ludvig, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. In his early years there, the orchestra grew to 40 members and Graupner focused much of his compositional energies on composing and producing Italian operas. Subsequent budget cuts led a reduction of the orchestra’s size and led Graupner to apply for the directorship in Leipzig in 1722. When Graupner’s employer in Darmstadt increased his salary, he declined the offer from Leipzig.

Graupner was a prolific composer; by the time he died in 1760, his works included 1418 church cantatas, 113 symphonies, and 86 orchestral suites. One endearing “Graupnerism” is his musical humor, evidenced in the chuckling ostinato (obstinately repetitive figure) in the gavotte in the December concert’s Entrata per musica di tavola.

Graupner’s repertoire of solo keyboard music is particularly rich and fresh. Canadian harpsichordist Geneviève Soly has devoted recent years to Graupner’s music. Her ensemble Les Idées Heureuses, which she codirects with Natalie Michaud, has been on the vanguard of the current Graupner revival, in much the same fashion as Tempesta has been with the orchestral music of Fasch. Check out this Amazon.com page with performances by Les Idées Heureuses of some of Graupner’s instrumental and vocal music.

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REVIEWS

Tempesta Turns Ten
Critics rave about Tempesta's season opener

“Period instruments concert on Hill the best ever”
Chestnut Hill Local, October 2011.
The program of music composed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Friedrich Fasch, William Boyce, Antonio Vivaldi and Jean-Philippe Rameau drew an enthusiastic crowd that showered the period-instrument musicians with round after round of applause. The program ... revealed both the breadth and depth of the baroque style of the 17th and early 18th centuries.... The strings—all strung with temperamental gut—were flawlessly blended and balanced. The woodwind choir of pairs of flutes, oboes and bassoons—all actually made of wood—were immaculately tuned and elegantly matched. The playing of brass choir of trumpets and horns was powerfully projected and securely ranged. And the timpani playing of Michelle Humphreys added just the right amount of thunder. Happy birthday, Tempesta di Mare! And here’s hoping there will be many more to come.” 

“Happy 10th, Tempesta: lots of players, delight at baroque chamber group’s grand celebration”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2011.
Tempesta di Mare threw itself a grand 10th birthday party last weekend, with a record-high assemblage of musicians—usually 25 were onstage, wind, brass, and all.... [W]ith it came one of the group’s most successful musical reclamations. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Fetes de Polymnie, whose neglect is clearly a cosmic mistake.... As a Ramist over many decades, I had barely heard the title of this piece, much less the music. This may be the single most marvelous discovery of Tempesta’s decade—thanks to cofounders Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone. William Boyce’s Symphony in A (Op. 2 No. 2) was ingratiating, as was Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins, which had a strong musical kinship to The Four Seasons but with all sorts of quadruple effects that come with having so many soloists.” 

“Celebrate good (Baroque) times”
Broad Street Review, October 2011.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Fanfare for the Ark opened the fête with three Baroque natural trumpets in full voice, boosted by Michelle Humphrey’s resonant work on the tympani. Horns, reed and strings then joined the trumpets and timpani for an overture by Johann Friedrich Fasch that maintained the pace and volume.... The Fasch revival has been one of Tempesta’s major projects, and this overture contained the special touches—such as unusual blends of string, oboes and bassoons—that characterize Fasch’s work. Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins, the first half finale, contains some of Vivaldi’s liveliest music, and the four soloists for this performance—Emlyn Ngai, Karina Fox, Fran Berge and Rebecca Harris—performed feats of coordination Baroque style—that is, without a conductor—which must be the musical equivalent of doing high-wire acrobatics without a net. Rameau’s suite from [Les Fêtes de Polymnie] ended Tempesta’s party with a banquet of courtly pleasure music. Its charms included more outbursts from the trumpets and tympani; unexpected effects like passages for the oboe that ended with little slides on Ngai’s violin; and a driving, darkly thrumming processional for the whole orchestra that suggested the Turkish rhythms later popularized by Beethoven and other composers. Would that we could all celebrate our birthdays in such style.”

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Order your copy of Fasch: Orchestral Works II now for immediate shipping. The disc is officially released in North America on November 15, 2011, but we have them in stock now, so you can have your copy shipped directly from us right away while supplies last. Or download the full album from The Classical Shop (prices in £ Sterling) and hear why Fasch has fast become one of our audience's favorite composers.

Over the last few years, Tempesta di Mare has been at the vanguard of the rediscovery and critical revival of the music of composer and Bach-contemporary Johann Friedrich Fasch. In 2008, Chandos Records released an acclaimed CD of Tempesta's Fasch recordings, Fasch: Orchestral Music. The success of this album, and Tempesta's continued forays into Fasch's impressive repertoire, has resulted in a new release of modern premiere recordings of this imaginative Baroque composer. All four pieces were recorded live in concert.

Fasch Orchestral Works II Contents:
• Concerto in D, FWV L:D5 • Ouverture in A Minor, FWV K:a1
• Sinfonia in G Minor, FWV M:g1 • Concerto in G, FWV L:G13

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