Early-music groups are in the business of attracting audiences to music they didn’t know they were missing. So the question at last weekend’s Tempesta di Mare concerts was what sort of keys can unlock the demure, even obscure artistic sensibility of Alessandro Scarlatti, a giant in 18th-century Rome but one whose output is like a vast lost continent. The fact that Scarlatti wrote 700-plus cantatas suggests they weren’t meant for repeated hearings and thus don’t ask to enter one’s memory. Therefore performers must mine the music for all it can deliver in the moment. Tempesta ultimately succeeded, both on Sunday and on its new Chandos-label disc, Alessandro Scarlatti: Cantatas and Chamber Music. An essential ingredient is soprano Clara Rottsolk, a relative newcomer to the Philadelphia music community and one with exactly the kind of vocal charisma this music needs. The voice combines the best aspects of the pinpoint, low-vibrato accuracy of Julianne Baird and the dark-timbred, more generalized approach of Montserrat Figueras. Though some baroque specialists use the music like heightened speech, Rottsolk integrated text into a longer phrase that, thanks to her considerable coloristic resources, went beyond surface articulation and into the text’s meaning. The exterior was suave and composed. The interior had dynamicism—partly because co-artistic director Richard Stone’s contributions on archlute seemed to consciously create dramatic signposts in music that can too easily fall into sameness. Philadelphia Inquirer, January 2011.
The church’s main sanctuary was nearly filled by local music-lovers eager to hear a select ensemble of chamber players from Tempesta di Mare, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, perform instrumental and vocal music by George Frideric Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti. Both the beauty and sophistication of the Roman musical scene during the early decades of the 18th century were efficaciously revived by Tempesta’s internationally acclaimed musicians. The concert got off to a lovely start with Scarlatti’s Sonata in C. The overall sound proffered by Tempesta’s six instrumentalists was ravishingly beautiful. The tone was delicately sweet and the texture was bracingly clear, allowing for eloquently turned phrases and elegantly suave voicings. The two instrumental works by Handel were played with equal technical polish and interpretive passion. A darker, more introspective mood was delineated throughout [his] Concerto No. 3, with the Sarabande receiving a particularly touching rendition. The performance given the Trio Sonata presented a broader spectrum of colors and emotions. The opening Larghetto was smoothly lyrical, the second movement Allegro was tautly muscular, the third movement Adagio was gently intimate and the closing Allegro bristled with rhythmic panache. Throughout all three instrumental scores, the playing was exemplary. Ensemble and balance immaculate, but even more importantly the music sang with emotional connection and commitment. These last few seasons have seen and heard Tempesta di Mare rise to the highest level of period performance. And the ensemble never sounds better than it does in Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church. Chestnut Hill Local, January 2011.
Handel traveled to Rome because Baroque Italy was a center of musical development. The Tempesta di Mare concert presented sonatas and cantatas he wrote in Rome and works by Scarlatti that he would have heard. Clara Rottsolk possesses a soprano voice with the coloring of a mezzo—an ideal choice for music that was probably composed for male altos. The cantatas she sang would have been performed in 18th-century drawing rooms and princely halls—settings that would be more relaxed and informal than modern concert halls. Rottsolk’s voice and expressive delivery successfully recreated that atmosphere for a modern ticket-buying audience seated in orderly rows. The three instrumental pieces on the program all opened with mood-setting slow movements, but they included their share of livelier interludes. Anyone who thinks fugues are formal exercises should listen to the spirited fiddling by Emlyn Ngai that introduced the fugal movement in Scarlatti’s Sonata in C. The musical pleasures Messrs. Handel and Scarlatti crammed into their creations included appealing sonorities for voice, strings, and winds; a duet that violinists Ngai and Karina Fox played with appropriate flair; a gentle pastoral solo for recorder that opened the evening; and the customary moments when the harpsichord and the cello support the soloists with a well timed flourish. Broad Street Review, January 2011.