1. The Lute Duets
Tempesta di Mare’s 2019 Artist Recital Series included the modern premiere of four lute duets by Bach-contemporary Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750). Rehearsing and previewing these Weiss duets with my partner Cameron Welke was some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing lute. These pieces also have an interesting back story that’s too big to fit into our recital-series format of spoken introductions by the performers, so I am using Tempesta’s blog for a more in-depth account, starting with the genesis of this project.
Back in the eighties—my twenties—I was an at-large Fulbright/Lusk Fellowship scholar in London studying baroque music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, taking lute and theorbo lessons from Nigel North, and indulging just about every cultural interest that piqued my curiosity in the British capital. Among my nerdier (though not my nerdiest) activities was attending presentations of The Lute Society whenever I could.
A game-changing event at the Lute Society happened when Tim Crawford— one of the world’s authorities on the music of Weiss—my favorite lute composer—gave a presentation on the Weiss lute concerti. Four concerti survive to the present, but in all instances only the solo lute parts remain; all parts for the accompanying ensembles were lost. But at his lecture, Tim played concert audio of one of these concerti, for which the lost parts had been recently reconstructed. The results amazed me, so I asked Tim about the other concerti. The only reconstruction was the one I’d heard, and he encouraged me to try my hand at reconstructing the rest of them myself.
And so I did try my hand in the early nineties, now relocated stateside, launching a project that spun off the founding of Tempesta’s concert series (2002–today), the first of many releases on the British label Chandos (2004–today), and the first edition of the Weiss lute concerti (2004).
In the course of polishing the missing accompaniments for the concerti, I encountered four Weiss lute duets, each lacking one of its two parts. The surviving parts hinted at delightful music, and though I sketched out reconstructions for these at the same time as the concerti, the duets got mothballed as the pace of Tempesta’s activity increased. I knew a performance deadline would get me to advance these duets to a polished state, so we set these recital dates last season, and I devoted much of last summer to getting these reconstructions ready for this season’s performances.
I am glad I made the time for these duets. As I said earlier, the music is a lot of fun. In coming articles, I plan to talk about what is special about Weiss as a composer, how these duets are special within the Weiss oeuvre, a bit about each duet specifically, and, time permitting, the wider circumstances of Weiss’s ensemble music.