Newsletter
March 2012

Table of contents

• Next: Party of the Muses — March 24 and 25
• Listen: Hear a sample from Party of the Muses


• Backstory: Emlyn Ngai and the Locatelli Monster
• Pre-Concert Talk: Steven Zohn comes to the Party of the Muses
• Advocacy: Speak Up for Pennsylvania Arts Funding
• Composer Spotlight: Johann Sigismund Kusser


• Program: Party of the Muses — works performed
• When and Where: venues, times
• Tickets: single tickets for Party of the Muses

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NEXT

March 24 and 25
Party of the Muses
an orchestral program of Tempesta firsts

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Tempesta introduces a new class of four baroque composers, all of whom appear on our series for the first time, to an imaginary freshman-mixer concert, hosted by Johann Friedrich Fasch, himself a newcomer on our series just a few seasons back. We're calling the event Party of the Muses.

The Tempesta di Mare orchestra will perform Johann Sigismund Kusser’s theatrical Festin des Muses, a tour-de-force violin concerto by Pietro Antonio Locatelli with Emlyn Ngai, and modern premieres of a symphony by Johann Samuel Endler and a concerto grosso by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. All this alongside a rip-snorting orchestral suite by Fasch. Free pre-concert talks by Dr. Stephen Zohn will introduce the four new-to-us composers. Performances of this 10th Anniversary Season program take place on March 24 and 25 in Center City and Chestnut Hill. Discounted, advance-purchase tickets are available online, by phone and by mail order; regular-price tickets are available at the door.

Party of the Muses opens with twenty-four performers onstage for Fasch’s rousing Orchestral Suite in F, FWV K:F1. This high-powered work employs opulent wind forces—pairs of horns, flutes, oboes and bassoons—in the innovative and colorful fashion that’s a Fasch trademark. The suite, which we’ll record in concert for release on Chandos later in 2012, wraps up Tempesta’s two-season, in-concert recording project of music by the Bach-contemporary, whom we first introduced to Philadelphia audiences five seasons ago and in whose international revival Tempesta has played an important role.

Press the play button below to catch a preview of the suite.

(Feature continues below)

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BACKSTORY

Emlyn Ngai and the Locatelli Monster
by Anne Hunter

“It’s really hard, virtuosically hard,” Emlyn Ngai says about Pietro Antonio Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in B-flat, Op. 3, No. 7. He should know. He won the Locatelli Concours Amsterdam with it in 1995, while still a graduate student. Receiving first prize in that competition got Ngai the opportunity to record a solo CD for Nonesuch Records and to perform with Milan’s famous baroque ensemble, Il Giardino Armonico, and the launch of a great career. The Locatelli concerto, like the other pieces in the upcoming Party of the Muses program, might be new to Tempesta di Mare, but Emlyn Ngai and Op. 3, No. 7 are old friends.

Or shall we say frenemies? In the baroque world and even today, the twelve Op. 3 concertos are objects of terror. The “caprices” in each concerto make the performer run a gauntlet of extreme high passagework, leaps, skips, double and triple stops, crazy chords, gymnastic bowings, trill and thrills galore. They’re monsters.

Contemporaries called Locatelli “The Earthquake.” Some complained that what he wrote was unseemly and more about spectacle than music. But it did in fact signal a direction that would boom in the nineteenth century with Romantic superstar virtuosi such as Niccolò Paganini.

And Ngai enjoys putting on a good show. “It comes off well in performance,” he says. “Locatelli combines the lyrical and attractive with things that are theatrically flashy, things that are meant to dazzle.” He laughs. “Kind of like Cirque du Soleil.”

Anne Hunter, Contributing Editor,
is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia.

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NEXT (Continued)

PRE-CONCERT TALK Steven Zohn Comes to the Party of the Muses by Anne Hunter Steven Zohn will give a free talk before each of Tempesta di Mare’s Party of the Muses concerts. He is author of Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (Oxford University Press, 2008, winner of the 2010 William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society), Associate Professor of Music History at Temple University, and a performer on baroque flute. Because Zohn’s work involves him in the wide landscape of German 18th-century musical culture and personalities, he’s able to provide uniquely informed insights on currents and trends of the period. He’s not fazed that the Party of the Muses program includes modern premieres that will be as new to Zohn as to the rest of us. New discoveries are part of his job, and he looks forward to getting to know these himself. “It’s great that Tempesta’s Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone avoid the top-40 lists and aren’t afraid to take risks,” says Zohn.; He’ll help audience members make themselves feel at home at the Party.

The incoming class brings two modern world premieres to this program. The first is Stölzel’s Concerto Grosso in E Minor for flute, oboe and strings, featuring flutist Gwyn Roberts and oboist Debra Nagy. The imitative fast outer movements will be reminiscent of the mood in Arcangelo Corelli’s minor-key concerti grossi. The other modern premiere will be Endler’s Symphony in G for horns, flutes and strings. In contrast to the solidly high-baroque seriousness of the Stölzel, Endler has penned his symphony in a breezier, whimsical manner.

Locatelli is the best-known of the incoming class’s composers, famous for pioneering advances in the sort of devilish, virtuoso violin technique that Paganini later cashed in on. Tempesta concertmaster Emlyn Ngai established himself as a violin whiz in 1995 when he won the International Locatelli Concours Amsterdam performing Locatelli’s acrobatic Violin Concerto No. 7 in B-flat from Opus 3. In Party of the Muses, Ngai recaps his early triumph for Philadelphia audiences by performing his winning concerto.

The mixer-concert concludes with its namesake, the fourth suite from Kusser’s 1700 publication Le Festin des Muses (Party of the Muses). Hungarian-born Kusser, along with Georg Muffat, imported Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Parisian style to the German-speaking world through their publications and pioneered what quickly emerged as the signature German “mixed” style of Bach’s generation, just a decade later. This suite from Festin has a characteristic folksy quality.

Dr. Steven Zohn of Temple University, author of Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (Oxford University Press, 2008), the first book-length study of the composer’s music to appear in English, will deliver the pre-concert talks before the performances of Party of the Muses. See the inset for further information.

Purchase advance tickets online and by phone until midnight on February 3, or at the door. Advance-purchase Preferred, General and Senior tickets receive a $5 discount. See below for details.

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ADVOCACY

Speak Up for Pennsylvania Arts Funding

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We at Tempesta di Mare ask you please to take a moment of your time to contact your legislator and remind them that arts and culture are crucial to Pennsylvania’s tax base, our tourism industry and the health and prosperity of our communities.  Go to the Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania website to email your legislators.  

Support for Tempesta di Mare from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts has been essential for us to deliver the programming you value.

On Tuesday, February 7th, Governor Tom Corbett addressed the General Assembly and proposed that this year's funding for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts remain level with last year’s budget. 

Members of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives began to hold hearings on February 21st and soon they will put forth their own budget proposal.  Last year, they proposed a cut in arts funding of almost 70%. That is why we need to be proactive and let our representatives know that arts and culture are crucial to Pennsylvania’s economy and provide a great return on a minimal public investment.

Pennsylania spends about 71 cents per person on the arts. In return, arts and culture is an industry that:

    • supports 62,000 jobs,
    • pumps $2 billion of spending into our economy, and
    • generates $283 million in much needed local and state tax revenues

Remember please to thank Governor Corbett for his support. You can also do this from the Citizens for the Arts website.

We at Tempesta in turn thank you for taking a moment of your time for arts advocacy.

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PROGRAM

Party of the Muses
an orchestral program of Tempesta firsts

March 24 & 25

Tempesta di Mare
Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
Gwyn Roberts & Richard Stone, Artistic Directors • Emlyn Ngai, Concertmaster

see below for tickets

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COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT

Johann Sigismund Kusser

by Gwyn Roberts

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Johann Sigismund Kusser (1660–1727) was an international character. He was born to Hungarian parents in Pressburg (now Bratislava, in Slovakia) and spent time in France, Germany, England and Ireland, antagonizing people everywhere he went. While in his twenties, he spent six years in Paris studying with Jean-Baptiste Lully, the master and arbiter of French musical taste and practice under Louis XIV, the dancing king.

Kusser’s first job after returning to Germany was to train the Ansbach court orchestra to play in the French style, but he only lasted one year there — the first of many short-lived appointments. In his Musicalisches Lexicon, the first major music dictionary published in German, Johann Gottlfried Walther notes that Kusser traveled and worked throughout Germany but “was unable to remain long in one place because of his volatile and fiery temperament.” He insulted the court poet at Wolfenbüttel, argued with the manager of the Hamburg Opera, fought with the church council and the musicians at Stuttgart, etc., etc., etc. Eventually, even though he was skilled as a composer and director of both French and Italian musical styles, he effectively ran out of places to work in Germany. He moved to London in 1704 and then on to Dublin in 1707, where he spend the remainder of his life.

Kusser built the first part of his career mainly on what he learned from Lully, whose famously disciplined orchestra was the first to use uniform bowing, among other important innovations. To get a sense of Lully’s enduring influence, picture the imprecision of an orchestra where the bows all move up and down at different times vs. the synchronized strokes we are so accustomed to. In keeping with the King’s taste, Lully composed suites of dances for his orchestra, scored for a strong, gracefully ornamented top line and robust bass section and accompanied by the lighter remplissage (“filling”) of the viola sections. Kusser — who Frenchified his name to Jean Sigismond Cousser to signal his affinity for this style — contributed considerably to the huge popularity of this genre of music in Germany in the latter years of the 17th century. He published three sets of Lully-style Overture-Suites, including Festin des muses, or Party of the Muses.

Gwyn Roberts is Artistic Co-Director of Tempesta di Mare.

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