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FEATURE
Harpsichordist Baroque composers rarely gave harpsichords in orchestras those blistering, bravo!, wave-your-cell-phones-around-in-the-air solos that other instruments get. Generally, harpsichordists like Tempesta di Mare’s Adam Pearl are the ultimate ensemble players, not the divas. But that’ll change in Tempesta’s upcoming program, The Chamber Concerto. Adam Pearl is taking the big solo in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5. It is perhaps the first harpsichord concerto in the entire repertoire, which Bach may have composed to be a bravura number for himself. This concerto has been a big vehicle for keyboard virtuosos—piano or harpsichord—ever since. “It’s flashy,” Pearl says about the Brandenburg. “Some of it is the kind of flashy that lies under the hand well, but some of it is the kind of flashy that’s really, really hard. And there’s the cadenza, lovely and very strange and several minutes long. Just several minutes of the harpsichord showing off.” He sounds amused. He’s fine with being in the spotlight. But for him, a solo showstopper like no. 5 is a sideshow. As a continuo player, staying deep in the mix and making everybody else sound just as good as he does is the challenge that most attracts him. And that’s a riskier business than you’d think. Usually he doesn’t even have notes to play from. Audience members may not realize it, but the chord-playing continuo members in a baroque ensemble—in Tempesta, keyboard and lute—are improvising their parts on the spot. Composers only provided continuo players with a bass line and occasionally with chord suggestions, much like the charts that jazz players work from. If you've seen keyboard continuo parts in modern editions of baroque music, these are “realizations,” a present-day, composed stand-in for what professional baroque music specialists typically improvise. When you see Tempesta's Pearl and Stone in performance, they’re winging it every time. (FEATURE continues below) |
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Program
The Chamber Concerto  
 plus music by Pachelbel, Fasch, Graupner and Telemann December 19 & 20 Open Doors - Free Admission Tempesta di Mare | Chamber Players Gwyn Roberts, flute & recorder • Emlyn Ngai, violin • Edmond Chan, violin Karina Fox, viola • Eve Miller, cello • Andrew Arceci, bass Richard Stone, lute & theorbo • Adam Pearl, harpsichord
Dates, Times and Locations
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FEATURE (continued) “You might think that if you have to make up your own part, it would be harder than playing from music. But I feel freer improvising continuo.” says Pearl. “I can think about the music and about reacting with the other players much more easily than when I have the notes laid out in front of me.” He explains that when he improvises during a performance, “most of my thought is taken up by listening to what’s going on around me and trying to fit into it, enhancing it, and making the same shapes that everyone else is making.” Take louds and softs, for instance. The harpsichord, a plucked instrument, has a limited dynamic range. Pearl expresses dynamics through his chord choices. “I definitely don’t play with one volume. I rise and fall with the orchestra,” he says. “When everybody is playing softly, I’ll drop down to as few notes as I can get away with, sometimes just one or two. When things are loud, I’ll play six, seven, even eight notes at a time, which makes much more sound than playing one note.” To go back to Brandenburg 5, Pearl may be playing the big solo all alone, but as the complete continuo player, he’s thinking more about the ensemble. “The first time I played Brandenburg 5 was with a modern orchestra,” he says. “It was large, probably six to eight violins on each part, and the musicians weren’t early music players. It felt like trying to drive an 18-wheeler with another eighteen-wheeler stuck on top of it, this massive machine. Once you started it up, there was no room left for maneuvering at all. “I’ve been really looking forward to doing this with Tempesta and a small group. It’s going to be like driving a sports car. I’ll be able to take the turns, you know,” says Adam Pearl. “I’ll be able to live dangerously.”
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ABOUT
Chestnut Hill, Dec 19 Tempesta di Mare continues its season of J.S. Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concertos with The Chamber Concerto. This program, the second installment of the four-part Brandenburgs series, will be performed on Saturday, December 19 at 8 pm at the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Chestnut Hill and Sunday, December 20 at 3:30 pm at Old St Joseph’s Church in Center City. Admission is free as part of Tempesta’s “Open Doors” free-admission program. Seating is limited and registration is required. Get your tickets in advance online or by calling 215-755-8776. December’s The Chamber Concerto program features harpsichordist Adam Pearl in Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, Richard Stone in Fasch’s Lute Concerto, and Gwyn Roberts in a Graupner suite for recorder and strings, along with ensemble pieces by Pachelbel and Telemann in which virtuosos play off each other as “firsts among equals,” in Roberts’ words. Tempesta di Mare has never played the Brandenburgs as a group until this season. Tempesta’s founders and Artistic Co-Directors Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone take this even further: they will examine the Brandenburgs in detail, using them as an entry point to present other music which is related to, inspired or influenced by the Brandenburgs, some of it rarely or never yet heard in modern times. “We are focusing on a baroque period made up of a broad spectrum of tastes— fascinating times, with many other brilliant composers’ voices,” Stone says. Brandenburgs will present a certain challenge, because everyone has heard them so many times,” comments Stone. “However, the way we make music is so engaging—both for musicians and audience—that I think we’ll strike the right chord with a fresh musical point of view.” Indeed, since its conception, Tempesta has claimed its own unique niche in the Philadelphia music landscape: performing without a conductor, applying a chamber music collaborative work process even with the full orchestra and, thus, making it a very immediate and intimate experience for all. “Our work process is more akin to an ensemble theater, so we regard the music we play more as a script than a doctrine,” explains Stone. “Bach’s music can be very dramatic if you regard it as a dramatic, rhetorical form and not just as the notes you have to play. We find the most dramatic interpretation of the music and make it feel conversational.” The October concert, Concerto en Suite, included Brandenburg Concerto no. 1. January’s Concerto alla Venetiana, a collaboration with Baltimore ensemble Pro Musica Rara, will include Brandenburg’s 2 and 3. In March Tempesta takes a break from the Bach to perform Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka’s stirring Lamentations of Jeremiah, music for Holy Week. The Brandenburg cycle wraps up with the series finale in May, with Concertos no. 4 and 6. Find out more about what’s on our series here. |
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SCARLATTI CD UPDATE
It’s in the can! As they say in the biz, our project’s “in the can,” musician slang meaning that the project is now on tape and ready to move on to the mastering stage. What a fun and exciting project it was, too. We gathered at the new sanctuary of Saint Peter in the Great Valley, up near Paoli. It has a beautiful, natural sound, with its wood-and-glass interior. And when we had breaks, we could look out the grand windows at the adjacent colonial-era sanctuary above, with its resident sheep tending its historic graveyard, or watch deer and migrating birds crossing the meadow below. Our performances got recorded quickly, with good humor, and about as effortlessly as anything as nerve-wracking as studio recording can go down. It’s an amazing process to record in a studio setting. The only audience you have is each other and the producer, and I think we managed to egg each other on to give our best performances. If we performed an aria three times, the performance evolved each time we did it. On the department-of-astonishing-things front, we have to tip our collective hat to engineer and producer David Walters, a true Tonmeister, who captured a gorgeous sound. In this day and age of anybody with the equipment being able to record an event, it’s a refreshing reminder to come across the extraordinary talents of a trained audio engineer and sessions producer like David. Thanks for your interest, support and good wishes,
Clara
We would like to thank those of you who have already helped us to raise the first $3,000 of the $10,000 to fund this CD. We look forward to saying thanks many more times! Now we’re moving forward getting the liner notes ready for Chandos. We hope we can count on you to help us keep things moving ahead and to be able to make more recordings for you to enjoy in the future. If you, gentle reader, were considering supporting this project, there’s still time to get listed in the liner notes as a supporter and to receive some sweet thank-you gifts. We have a handy, secure pledge form for online contributions, or you can mail a check to Tempesta di Mare, 1034 Carpenter St, Philadelphia 19147. Your contribution is completely tax-deductible. With best wishes and sincerest thanks for your continued support, Gwyn & Richard
Gwyn Roberts & Richard Stone |
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PROFILE
A man with a plan, and two wheels to help Have you noticed more Tempesta di Mare concert flyers popping up all over the city? Much of this distribution is the result of the hard work of one man: Mr Jere Edmunds. Jere is a one-man show. His company, We Do It (For You), has been in operation since 1987, when he noticed that the arts and culture scene in the area needed a boost. What began as a job for supplemental income in between acting jobs has now become a full-time profession. “I often work six or seven days a week,” he says. “It’s a lot, but it makes for great sleep!” This we can certainly believe, since Jere’s main mode of transportation is his bicycle. “Twenty years ago, there were fewer arts organizations in Philly, and they all seemed to advertise in the same old way: newspapers and radio. I saw an opportunity to go out into neighborhoods, make people aware of what was going on in their area, and generate some enthusiasm about it. It was a much smaller-scale, personal approach, much like the newsboys in the days of Vaudeville.” This is what, Edmunds says, separates him from larger distribution agencies. Because he is personally committed to the success of arts and culture in this area, he has been able to pick and choose the organizations that he distributes for. “If you have a good product and you’re consistent, people will eventually catch on. That’s why it’s easy to market a group like Tempesta di Mare. You are consistently producing high-quality performances.” When asked where he has the most success at reaching potential audience members, Jere shares some unusual locales: libraries, indie movie theaters, and specialty grocery stores. “It seems to me that people who value reading and literacy are the same people who value the arts in their community. It’s the same with grocery stores that supply products from local farms. People who support local agriculture also tend to support local arts organizations.” Jere comes from an artistic family with strong roots in the Philadelphia region. His uncle, Allen Edmunds, was founder of the Brandywine Workshop, a school and gallery focused on the art of printmaking, located on the Avenue of the Arts. Allen’s wife, Anne Edmunds, was funds manager of the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for several years. Jere attended the Academy of Fine Arts and later went to New York to pursue a career in acting. Upon returning to Philadelphia, Jere worked as a sound and lighting technician in addition to doing publicity. “As long as I’m involved in the arts in some way, I’m happy,” he says. We’re certainly glad that he’s involved in our organization! So if you happen to see a gentleman on a bicycle in a newsboy cap with panniers loaded with Tempesta materials, please stop and thank him for his hard work in keeping the arts going strong in Philadelphia.
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PS FROM THE DIRECTORS
Tempesta di Mare • 1034 Carpenter St • Philadelphia PA 19147 • 215-755-8776 • www.tempestadimare.org