Plus, a conversation with Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone.
Move over, Semiquincentennial! Here comes a Quadranscentennial, and it’s Tempesta di Mare’s! Twenty-five years ago, on the first weekend in October, Tempesta presented its first season’s very first show (which was, to be exact, Concerti for the Dresden Hofkapelle: Showpieces for Baroque Europe’s Most Spectacular Orchestra). That’s 25 years of boundary-busting baroque music. Happy 25th anniversary, Tempesta di Mare! Happy silver celebration! Happy Jubilee!
And it’s a significant milestone. No, twenty-five isn’t two hundred fifty. But for a small, independent non-profit like Tempesta, a Quadrans can be as big as a Semiquin. In specific, a Quadrans in 2026 means that the group kept sailing through the battering headwinds thrown by the 21st century thus far, including the triple whammy of 2008’s global financial crisis, the Covid pandemic from 2020 to 2023, and present-day funding uncertainties.
And Tempesta didn’t just survive. Tempesta thrived. By numbers alone, it’s been an amazing quarter century: more than 400 concert performances, plus recitals, artist chats and events. 14 CDs on the British label Chandos. 60 million annual US broadcast listeners which includes 175 appearances on Performance Today.
But those are just the numbers. Even more exceptional, undoubtedly, is what co-directors Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone have done with the time—bringing to bear grit, determination, and an undying belief in the music.
Waking Sleeping Beauty: 25 Seasons of Discovery
Even in 2000, baroque music was still a field dominated since the 19th century by towering figures like Bach and Handel but little curiosity about anything else. Gwyn and Richard didn’t buy that. They founded their group with a specific—and ambitious—mission: to find and rehabilitate the best buried treasures in baroque music.
And they have succeeded perhaps far beyond even their dreams. With every season and every program Tempesta has brought back to life more and more of the music that thrilled baroque Europe, not just from its great cities and glittering palaces but also from forgotten corners and byways where beautiful music seemed to be just waiting like Sleeping Beauties to be reawakened by two energetic 21st century Philadelphians.
For twenty-five years, Gwyn and Richard have been following their quest with laser focus, exploring, experimenting, questioning musical orthodoxy. They’ve gathered and encouraged a solid community of like-minded fellow players in Philadelphia and brought in an enthusiastic audience eager to join and support the group on their far-flung musical explorations. And they’ve been able to go deeper and farther than maybe even they might have imagined in 2001.
They credit their remarkable success at least in part to “deep dives,” extended periods of study—sometimes lasting years—during which ensemble members burrow into the history of a composer or a musical community and thoroughly immerse themselves in that cultural place and moment.
Gwyn and Richard on Deep Dives
They talked to me about their deep dives this summer:
“It’s become our hallmark,” says Gwyn. She uses Johann Friedrich Fasch, contemporary of Bach and Handel, as an example. The group has been ruminating on Fasch since 2007, bringing his work back from virtual obscurity with countless performances and four CDs. “The Fasch vein is one that is super deep and that we keep going into in really interesting ways,” she says.
“Right, yes,” says Richard. “Our deep dives let us try to understand what is distinctive about a composer’s voice. A generic approach, like playing music of Germany as if it were all the same hybrid, that doesn’t work for us. We dive in to find things that Telemann does that Fasch does not do, for instance, that Handel does that the other two don’t.”
“Yes,” says Gwyn, “it’s a lot about seeing all these people as individuals. That goes to their musical styles and their musical tastes and what they do to each other’s music and what they appreciate in each other’s music, what they copy from each other’s music.
“What was going on 300 years ago that is extremely humanly relatable is totally interesting to me,” she continues. “Not only the artistic, but also the human side and the interaction side and the relationships, the tastemakers and the players and the colleagues. Telemann traveled to Paris once, when he was 56, in 1737. How long did it actually take him to travel there? And what did that trip feel like? What would he be traveling in and on? And how comfortable or uncomfortable was it?…”
A Few of Their Favorite Things
Telemann has been a deep-dives subject, one of four to date. 2018 saw the Telemann 360° Festival, a weekslong series of performances, presentations and pop-ups and his music will figure heavily later in the Jubilee season; French orchestral music got a deep dive in 2014—16, with season-spanning concerts and two CDs for Chandos, Comédie et Tragédie, vols. 1 and 2; following that, music associated with Berlin keyboardist and salonnière Sara Levy and her two talented sisters was up for a dive including the CD Johann Gottlieb Janitsch in 2017; and of course, the women orchestras of the Venetian ospedali have been a focus since 2020 with multiple Hidden Virtuosas concerts and programs.
Which is why, when Gwyn and Richard started thinking about what favorite things to include in their Jubilee concert, Brilliance and Endurance, they found themselves choosing not a greatest hits show but instead what is essentially a snapshot of the dynamic flux that has been every minute of Tempesta’s first twenty-five years.
They’re including some deep-dive subjects, like a Fasch premiere and Jean-Féry Rebel’s French orchestral suite Les Éleméns that Richard loves, with a “crazy opening chord” that depicts creation from primordial chaos.
But there’s also a Bach concerto just this year re-cast by Richard for recorder soloist—one of many of Richard’s rearrangements and “reimaginings” of Bach over the years. And there’s something completely new and different: a sinfonia by nearly unknown composer Camilla de Rossi—one of four Italian women whose music was performed at the Viennese court in the early 18th century —who will be unknown no longer, as she and they are subjects of the next Deep Dive.
Brand-new work in a program of favorites? Seems entirely on brand. Tempesta may be hitting twenty-five, but they’re not resting on their laurels. Not even for a second.
Congratulations to Tempesta di Mare for 25 years of challenging, exploring, digging deep and taking us to new worlds! Gratitude! May the silver season shine!
Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian in Philadelphia. www.anneschusterhunter.com.
