Tempesta di Mare celebrates autumn with 'The Four Seasons'
Vivaldi's Four Seasons is a great piece, but when you can hear it anywhere from public radio pledge drives to train stations, how do you make it interesting?
Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
is a great piece, but when you can hear it anywhere from public radio pledge drives to train stations, how do you make it interesting?
By taking it apart and showing how it's put together. That's what Tempesta di Mare is doing for its 15th anniversary season, which opened Saturday evening at the American Philosophical Society. The group is spreading the four concertos over four concerts (this one featured "Autumn"), with lesser-known music from the era filling out each program.
Tempesta co-director Richard Stone began the evening with a short lecture-demonstration, reading each line of descriptive poetry that Vivaldi sprinkled through the score and having the orchestra play the passage it marks. We heard just how the stamped-out rhythms of the opening represent tipsy peasants dancing at a post-harvest party - and how they gradually fall over drunk as those rhythms become slower and less steady; how everyone sleeps the booze off through the middle movement; how the galumphing of the third movement depicts a big party tramping off to the hunt.
When it came to playing the concerto through, Tempesta gave an ebullient reading with a rustic buzz to the string tone. Violinist Emlyn Ngai is not a showy, charismatic soloist - he came across more as leader of the group than star of the show – but his command of timing and rhetoric was excellent.
Two hybrid concerto-dance suites featured Tempesta's other co-director, Gwyn Roberts, with colleague Héloïse Degrugillier. In the Concerto No. 3 from Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco's Op. 5, their flute-playing seemed impassive next to the lively strings, but when they switched to piccolo recorders for Francesco Maria Veracini's Overtura VI in G minor (written originally for two oboes with strings), the pair came into their own and the sparks flew. This is not profound or complex music, but it packed a punch.
Speaking of violence, the concert's finale was a portrait of Medea: Louis-Nicolas Clérambault's Médée, in which a soprano sings the sorceress' jealousy, sadness and fury as she summons demons to punish her unfaithful Jason and poison his new fiancée. (This time, the poor kids are left out of it.) Soprano Marguerite Krull is a sensitive musician with a good feel for the tricky French baroque style. Yet her voice, though not at all big or blunt, seemed a bit unwieldy: she negotiated the grace notes and ornaments, but one could feel the effort (which is very un-French). It was only in the final aria, when Medea sends the demons off to commit murder and mayhem, that Krull seemed really warmed up and the torrents of notes flowed freely.