Our Story

Conversational. Extroverted. Emotionally provocative.   

These words describe baroque music and the experience Tempesta di Mare delivers with every performance.

Baroque composers imbued their chamber and orchestral music with the powers of language, letting every listener experience as full a range of human emotion as from a play or poem. We craft our performances to bring baroque music’s most speech-like and emotive qualities front and center.

Whether as an orchestra or a chamber ensemble, our players transform the musical notes into dynamic, wordless dialogues in sound that win over audiences everywhere we play.

Led by directors Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, with concertmaster Emlyn Ngai, Tempesta defines itself by this rhetorical approach to baroque music through concerts, recordings and broadcasts, including:

• More than 375 concerts by more than 70 composers
• 45 modern world premieres and dozens more U.S. and regional premieres
• European and U.S. tours
• 12 acclaimed CDs on Chandos, where Tempesta remains the only American baroque orchestra on a roster of European ensembles
• More than 60 million annual broadcast-listeners in the U.S., with millions more in over 56 countries worldwide

To experience Tempesta is to experience nonstop discovery of repertoire both in and outside the canon: groundbreaking, modern rediscoveries, essential music by forgotten composers, overlooked works by famous composers, and even famous works by famous composers revealed in new ways.

Tempesta di Mare is named after a concerto by Antonio Vivaldi. Translated to mean “storm at sea,” Tempesta di Mare reflects the composers’ view of instrumental music as a vivid, rhetorical craft, capable of conveying emotional drama to its listeners. The orchestra performs self-led—no conductor—just as they did when the music was new.