Tempesta di Mare’s imaginative co-directors based their Characters of the Dance program on an inspired theme. They preceded Bach’s First Orchestral Suite with two pieces that contained examples of the baroque dances that Bach elaborated in the suite. The program’s first half illustrated the dances with a ballet score by the French court composer Jean-Féry Rebel and a suite by Johann Friedrich Fasch—the long-lost Baroque composer Tempesta di Mare has been reviving. The Rebel is a hyperactive tour de force that runs through 12 dance forms in a single nonstop movement. The Fasch suite, like the Bach, is an entry in a Baroque tradition of orchestral pieces based on French dance music. Tempesta gave it a reading that included a properly sprightly bouree; a nervous, lively hornpipe; and a minuet that emphasized that form’s courtly, processional qualities. Good as these pieces were, you knew the program had jumped to a higher league as soon you heard the first notes of the Bach suite. Modern orchestras sometimes make the first suite sound smooth and bland. Tempesta’s baroque instruments emphasized the contrasts between the different sections and produced a performance in which you could hear every voice all the time. Tempesta combined the polyphony with lively tempos and interpretations that highlighted each dance’s special personality. The result was a spellbinder that held your attention from the first note to the final chord. I was especially charmed by the trio in Bach’s minuet movement. [Concertmaster] Emlyn Ngai, principal second violin Karina Fox, and principal viola Daniella Giulia Pierson created a touching, gently romantic interlude. But the trio was just one event in a stream of pleasures. The entire company turned in one of the best performances of the first suite I’ve heard, from the oboes at the top of the score through the all-important foundation supplied by bass player Anne Peterson. The second half included two Fasch pieces that departed from the dance theme: a four-movement sinfonia and a fugue excerpted from a suite. Fasch was an innovator whose music often foreshadows the romantic opuses of the 19th Century, and the sinfonia opens with a massive orchestral thump thump thump that immediately bounces you out of the 18th century’s aesthetics. It isn’t Beethoven, but Beethoven’s obviously waiting in the wings. The fugue ended the afternoon with a piece that proved Fasch shared Bach’s zest for all the complex possibilities created by the human brain’s ability to hear several sounds simultaneously.Broad Street Review, March 2011.
