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Newsletter April–May 2012 |
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FEATURE
Gwyn Roberts and a Feast of Tens
There’s a South Italian tradition during Nativity that’s popular in Philadelphia, the Feast of the Seven Fishes. It’s a grand meal with seven delectable courses: elegant bisques, hearty stews, delicate fillets and succulent bivalves. All different. All fish. For their big tenth anniversary celebration, Tempesta is cooking up a Feast of the Eighteen Tens. They’re presenting three concerts composed entirely of music with tens in the title. All different. And all wonderful. The brainchild of Gwyn Roberts, Tempesta Artistic Co-Director, flutist and recorder player, Opus 10 promises to be an aural banquet for the ages. The idea for Opus 10 all started with Vivaldi’s opus 10, which includes Il Gardellino, the concerto (Opus 10, Number 3) that kicks off Opus 10: Chamber (Opus 10: Solo and Opus 10: Orchestra take place the following day and weekend respectively). “Way back in high school, I loved my record of Frans Brüggen playing those concerti,” she says. They were the first things that came to mind when she started thinking of all those tens. A tour de force, Il Gardellino offers ten minutes of the titular goldfinch singing its heart out in the persona of Roberts on recorder. Il Gardellino is a crowd-pleaser, but the rest of the Opus 10: Chamber program gives it real competition and allows Roberts, Queen of the Woodwinds, to spread her own wings. There’s the Vivaldi on recorder, then she’ll play recorder again in Telemann’s Trio in A minor, the tenth sonata in the composer’s Esserzii Musici: “my favorite Telemann trio sonata of all time,” she says, “and one that I’ve never had the chance to play with Emlyn before.” Then there’s Haydn’s Divertimento No. 10 in A (Hob. IV/10), a sweet romp for flute with violin and cello, and Couperin’s Concert X—flute again—written originally for Louis XIV’s ultra-elite court musicians at Versailles. A program like this is something she couldn’t have foreseen ten years ago. Not only does she think of herself now as a flutist as much as a recorder player, but she finds her original instrument increasingly engrossing. “In my professional life, I was a Renaissance player when I started out on this Tempesta extravaganza,” she says (previously, she played in Philadelphia’s Piffaro, The Renaissance Band). “I thought then, as many people do, that Baroque recorder repertoire was limited. But ten years in, far from exhausting possibilities, we’re just beginning to tap its potential. It’s freaking awesome.” Give that a ten. Anne Schuster Hunter The Opus 10 Festival opens this weekend. Tickets and festival passes available online, by mail, by phone or at the door. |
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FESTIVAL PASS
Now Available Save while you enjoy two weekends of music at three not-to-be-missed concerts with preferred seating. Solo, Chamber and Orchestra. Reserve your Festival Pass today.
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FEATURE
Karina Fox: A Taste of Telemann
Karina Fox knew she wanted to play Telemann’s unaccompanied violin Fantasia X in Opus 10, but she had to convince herself. Three short movements, four brief minutes of solo violin, she just wasn’t sure it had the gravitas to stand up to the magisterial Bach cello suite that’s also on the program. Then she got over it. She loves Fantasia X, after all. Bach vs. Telemann? “Bach is so heavy, so cerebral. Telemann is by far more accessible, much more charming. He uses folk music. It’s really fresh. It’s a lot of fun to play,” say Fox. “Although it’s not simple, not at all.” Number 10 comes from a group of twelve unaccompanied fantasias for violin (Telemann wrote a set for flute, too, and one for viola da gamba that is now, sadly, lost). The challenge is how to make a satisfying piece of music with just a single line of melody. It’s a challenge Telemann meets with ingenuity and an obvious love for the violin and its many sounds. Number 10 starts out with a fugue, a musical form that involves several voices imitating each other. Writing a fugue for several instruments is one thing. Writing a fugue with only one voice at your disposal is a something else entirely. It provides a nice little puzzle for your performer, too. “You differentiate the single voice by the way you play, so that it sounds like several voices back-to-back,” says Fox. “In Number 10, in the fugue, I come up with a different character based on the different sounds of each register. I find it very difficult—and immensely appealing.” No wonder the Fantasias are the violinist’s violin music. The twelve pieces are a treasure trove of fantasy and invention. “When I’m at home, I just go through them all, reading them for fun. It’s a journey through all the different types of violin music that was composed in the Baroque era. It opens your eyes to so many possibilities. It just runs the gamut,” says Fox. “The range of the whole set of 12 fantasies is huge compared to the Bach unaccompanied pieces. And that’s really refreshing.” — ASH The Opus 10 Festival opens this weekend. Tickets and festival passes available online, by mail, by phone or at the door. |
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FEATURE
Eve Miller: Telling Stories On Bach
The six Bach cello suites are, simply, some of the most beloved music of all time. When Mstislav Rostropovich propped his cello in front of the crumbling Berlin Wall in the famous November 1989 telecast, he played a slow movement, the Sarabande, from Suite No. 1. Yo-Yo Ma played the Sarabande from No. 2 at the Ground Zero 10-year memorial ceremony. The cello suites turn up continually on movie soundtracks where they’re used to indicate deep thoughts and journeys of solitary discovery. People know the cello suites even if they don’t know they know them. They’re big. “Oh, they’re hard to play because they’re so iconic. Everybody knows them, they know what they like and what they don’t. Performances are very different. And what pleases one person may not please another,” says Eve Miller, who’ll be performing the Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat major. “I love that about Bach, the ways people interpret his music.” Preparing a suite seems to be a journey of discovery itself. The composer doesn’t give the player much direction for interpretation on the page. Bach’s own manuscripts are lost and the versions made by copyists, even if the copyist was his wife, have some pretty puzzling markings. Miller uses part informed decision and part intuition as she pulls the stories out from the notes. She likes following Bach’s mind as he works. “Sometimes he’ll establish a line or a pattern. It’s there once, twice, but then the third time, he just goes in a different direction. I find that infinitely fascinating, how to communicate that as a performer: ‘here we go, we’re turning a corner, something new is happening!’ That’s super pleasurable to work on.” She looks for how the individual personality of each movement reveals itself. Five of them have dance names: a gentle Allemande (“that’s becoming one of my favorite movements from this suite, it’s just so beautiful, restful and contemplative”), a Courante and Gavottes, a bumptious Gigue. “They’re not intended to be danced to, necessarily,” says Miller, “but I think as a performer, you need to keep the dances in mind.” Even those moody Sarabandes? “It’s funny, but actually those are the movements that I feel are most connected to actual dance,” Miller says. “As modern players, we tend to goo them up. But the historical dance called the Sarabande is a leapy dance. You’re off the ground for parts of it and landing on it in others.” Which is a pretty good metaphor for deep thought, when you think about it. — ASH The Opus 10 Festival opens this weekend. Tickets and festival passes available online, by mail, by phone or at the door. |
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Opus 10: Chamber
Saturday, May 12 at 8:00 pm “Open Doors” free-admission concert
Opus 10: Solo
Sunday, May 13 at 4:00
Opus 10: Orchestra
Saturday, May 19 at 8:00 Sunday, May 20 at 4:00
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FEATURE
Richard Stone: Revisiting Weiss
Richard Stone, Tempesta di Mare and the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss are forever linked. Back in 2000, well before their first season, Tempesta traveled to the Czech Republic and the Prague Spring Festival to perform modern world premieres of Weiss’s lute concerti, long considered lost. Stone had restored the concerti’s string and wind parts, bringing Weiss back to life as an orchestral composer. So in one way, Weiss launched Tempesta di Mare onto the fabulous decade being celebrated by Opus 10 now. And Silvius Leopold Weiss Lute Concerti became Tempesta’s first recording for Chandos in 2004. Stone jumped at the chance offered by Opus 10: Solo to play the Weiss Lute Sonata 15 in B-flat (10th suite in the Weiss “London” manuscript), a much-loved piece that he’d played on a coast-to-coast recital tour in that same Weiss Wonder Year of 2000. It also gives him the chance to tell the story behind its Sarabande movement, which the composer dubbed “The Complaint.” Stone says, “Weiss inscribed this Sarabande with a gentle reminder to an unnamed royal patron about a flotilla of gold which the patron expected, because Weiss purchased a chest of tea for this patron and was still owed the money. It's such a beautiful movement and is a far cry from the sorts of letters one gets these days from creditors!” One of the superstar performers of 18th-century Europe, Weiss not only worked in the legendary court orchestra of August II and III of Dresden, he was its highest-paid instrumentalist. He hobnobbed with royals from Russia to Vienna and was admired by J. S. Bach, who arranged one of his lute sonatas for harpsichord and violin. Above all, though, Weiss was a consummate performer. It wasn’t so much showiness or virtuosity that made his playing so admired. “Weiss’s music dazzles,” Stone says, “but as a byproduct of being superbly crafted.” Surviving lute tablature gives us a near-complete record of how Weiss maneuvered on the instrument. Stone describes it as “a perfect technical exploitation of the lute’s native capabilities that makes the music amazingly resonant.” Stone started playing Weiss when he began playing lute, in college, and he’s never stopped. “For me, playing solo Weiss is an ongoing thing, as is playing Bach on the lute, but more so,” he says. “It’s very, very satisfying to play. I come back to the concerti on occasion, but mainly it’s the solo music that’s the Big Joy.” — ASH The Opus 10 Festival opens this weekend. Tickets and festival passes available online, by mail, by phone or at the door. |
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All of our performances, recordings and broadcasts are made possible through the generosity of individuals and institutions who care deeply about what we do. As we approach the close of our landmark 10th Anniversary Season, please consider a new or additional gift to Tempesta. In addition to check and online contributions, Tempesta di Mare can now accept your gift of support as a stock donation through StockDonator. StockDonator offers an easy process through their direct links to brokerage firms such as ING Direct, Wells Fargo Advisors, E*Trade, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, Fidelity and others. Call Ulrike Shapiro at 215-755-8776 if you have any questions about your contribution. As always, thank you for your support! |
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SIGHTINGS
See us on the PECO Tower!
Tempesta’s Opus 10 Baroque Music Festival will flash across PECO Tower’s crown lights on May 10, 11 and 12. Take a picture and email it to us. We will post it on facebook! |
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Thank you for your support
Tempesta di Mare • 1034 Carpenter St • Philadelphia PA 19147 • 215-755-8776 • www.tempestadimare.org