Tempesta Presents Four Flavors of Concerto.
By Anne Schuster Hunter.
April may well be the sweetest month here in Philadelphia. Especially this April. The big sweets-eating holidays of Easter, Passover and Eid have been coming one after another in quick succession. And the city’s many boutique bakeries are answering the challenge with a plethora of sweet temptations on all sides.
To each their own Sweetmeat Avatar
What could be sweeter in this sweet, sweet month than some tasty music too? Tempesta di Mare is bringing us just that in Bach & Telemann, Four Flavors of Concerto. They’re offering four tempting pieces of music, all called “concerto,” but as different and various as the offerings in a pastry shop’s dessert display.
Pairing each piece in the program with its very own sweetmeat avatar was just too much to resist. So after each description below is suggested a companion pastry. To wit:
Bach Meets Chocolate
Bach’s Concerto in E major for violin, Emlyn Ngai, soloist. One of the best-known and best-loved pieces in the repertoire, it’s been performed and recorded by generations of violinists from Menuhin in the 1930’s through Grumiaux, Oistrach and myriad violinists of the early music movement. It’s been a touchstone for players and a listener favorite for nearly a century.
For good reason. It’s one Bach’s most satisfying works. It sets its high spirits right away in the bright opening notes of a major triad followed by a typically knotty journey by ensemble and soloist before what feels like a triumphant return. The third movement is equally light-hearted, and in between is one of those meltingly bittersweet slow movements that Bach did so very well. Emlyn Ngai is soloist.
On our Tempesta April dessert platter, the E major concerto is being by that star of many a Passover table, flourless chocolate cake: deep, complex, and profoundly sweet.
Handel and the Baklava
Handel’s Concerto in g minor (originally scored for oboe soloist, on Tempesta’s program performed on solo recorder by Gwyn Roberts). Handel was just 19 years old when he wrote it, having just left college and moved to Hamburg. There he worked at its famous opera house and soaked up the international musical cultures in that busy, cosmopolitan port city.
The g-minor concerto shows the lightning speed with which the precocious teenager picked up trends like fashionable Italian concerto forms. It’s a work Handel himself clearly thought highly of: he kept it in mind for decades, quoting from it in his 12 Grand Concertos, Op. 6, when he was in his fifties.
The pastry avatar for the Handel Concerto: baklava—a standby for celebrations after Ramadan’s with crispy pastry stuffed with pistachios and soaked in honey. It nourishes body and soul for the long run.
Four seasons of Cupcakes
Giovanni Antonio Guido’s “The Characters of the Seasons” and “Spring” from his Scherzi armonici sopra le quattro staggioni (The Four Seasons). Although Guido’s differs from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in many ways, it—like the Vivaldi—is attached to a poem. A line from Guido’s “Spring,” “Let’s taste the sweet pleasures, today we live,” seems perfectly embodied in his compositional writing for “Spring.” His instrumentalists bounce musical motifs back and forth as light and fluffy as spring blossoms on the breeze.
What else could stand in for Guido’s Spring than the frothiest, most delectable cupcakes out there?
A whole platter of pleasures
Telemann’s, Ouverture in A Minor. The Ouverture in A Minor became an early star during the post-war early music revival and quickly joined the best-known and loved works in modern Baroque repertoire—performed initially on modern flute, of course, as by Rampal in the 60s, Galway in the ‘70s and many others. Here, it will be performed in its original scoring for recorder by soloist, Gwyn Roberts.
Alas, the analogy between music and a single sweetmeat falls apart with the Ouverture in A minor. There are just too many sweet moments in it to do justice with a single delicacy. It packs in so much incident, variety, imagination, a joke or two and—in an Air a l’italien tucked away among the movements—a little heartache, that it requires a whole dessert platter on its own.
Delicious.
Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia, www.anneschusterhunter.com.
Treats (Photos by Anne S. Hunter):
Bach, Concerto in E major. Flourless brownie cupcakes topped with chocolate ganache from Second Daughter Baking Company, 1901 South 9th Street (Bok Building), Suite 403
Handel, Concerto in g minor. Baklava from Alyan’s Middle Eastern & Mediterranean Restaurant, 603 South 4th Street.
Giovanni Antonio Guido, The Characters of the Seasons and Spring. Cupcakes from Sweet Box Cupcakes, 339 South 13th Street.
Telemann, Ouverture in A Minor. Mint chocolate ice cream from The Franklin Fountain, 112 Market Street, macarons from Paris Baguette, 600 Washington Avenue, chocolates from Lore’s Chocolates, 34 South 7th Street.
Pastry display. Amigos Bakery Pastries Shop, 1155 South 9th Street.