Period instrument group tackles the French baroque

Maybe the French were too busy being charming, refined and picturesque to write down their music with great specificity during the glory years of the 18th century.

Yet Tempesta di Mare, a baroque orchestra used to making educated musical guesses, is putting that music at the center of a multi-year, multi-disc project titled Comedie et Tragedie. It fills a void where many hesitate to tread.

"If you look at the programming around the country, you see German and Italian, and no French," said Gwyn Roberts, Tempesta co-founder. "And French is one of the pillars of the baroque."

In a world of expensive rehearsal time, filling in the gray areas of French baroque with something that sparkles is the provenance of such European groups as Les Arts Florissants, which attracts full houses during U.S. visits and can even create a sensation now and then.

Thanks to years of intermittent decoding for themselves (Roberts spent her student years in the Netherlands and France), Tempesta di Mare achieves a comparable level of authority on its newly released Chandos label disc of music by Jean-Baptiste Lully - and is likely to go further in its Saturday concert at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater, featuring theater music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, among others. "The more we do it, the better we get," says co-founder Richard Stone. "It's music of a more subtle gesture."

Successions of identical notes might seem perfectly straightforward, for example. But they aren't meant to be played as written; their flow is dictated by the French language even though the music is purely instrumental. All sorts of rules are attached, though simply following them isn't enough.

"If somebody describes an elephant to you and you try to construct that thing without knowing what an elephant is," Roberts says, "you're not necessarily going to come up with an elephant."

Worst of all, the music can sound naked - and not in a good way. Though tiny grace notes might seem like peripheral ornaments, the music won't seem like much without them.

"When I put my students through the paces [at Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute in Baltimore], their jaws drop," Stone says. "The music just pops off the page."

And with concentrated attention, the rules recede into the background. "You just take it as your own. You play with it. You have fun," Stone says. "I don't worry too much if it's echt [authentic] enough. "

Though Comedie et Tragedie is the most expansive project of Tempesta's 19-year, 242-concert history - as well as the 21-year marriage of Roberts and Stone - they're used to even greater leaps in musical speculation, having championed Johann Friedrich Fasch, whose scores were damaged in the Dresden floods and required significant reconstruction efforts.

The other question is translating such research into viable concerts. Foundations tend to smile on long-term reclamation projects, while recording companies favor single-composer discs.

"You don't want to be giving the same concert over and over," Roberts says. "French baroque repertoire is very large, and there are many ways to see it in combination with other things . . . "

That's why the Saturday program mixes in English music by Henry Purcell, as well as a Spanish zarzuela from 1699 titled Destinos vencen finezas by Juan Francisco de Navas, which Stone stumbled across on the Internet, newly rich now that major European libraries are digitizing their holdings.

The next program, April 25-26, steps back from the generation of Lully and Rameau with soprano Rosa Lamoreaux singing cantatas by Nicolas Bernier and Thomas-Louis Bourgeois that employ the kind of descriptive effects that often put French baroque composers way ahead of their time. Musical descriptions range from blood flowing from open wounds to (on the new disc) the world exploding into existence in Jean-Féry Rebel's Les Elements.

One natural avenue for Comedie et Tragedie would have been staging French baroque opera. However, such "lyric tragedies," written for a corp of dancers as well as the usual singers, chorus and instrumentalists, is not easily funded. When Tempesta made a relatively modest foray into baroque theater a decade ago, "we lost our shirts," Stone says.

"I think we were still paying that one off last year," Roberts says. "We've come to realize that our primary identity . . . is that of an orchestra. We've put our energy and focus into making it the best orchestra we can."

Unlike some early-music ensembles that have a part-time concert season, Tempesta has maintained a remarkably stable roster of musicians, with Roberts on recorder, Stone on theorbo, plus violinist Emlyn Ngai and harpsichordist Adam Pearl. Some players live as far away as Cleveland, though the 14-member string section is almost entirely local. Administratively, the group is run by its founders with two added staff members. Though repertoire has been literally all over the map, from little-known Jewish composers to Handel's Messiah, an overall theme is that of defying received wisdom.

Not so long ago, Lully was considered to be superficial spectacle music. Jean-Philippe Rameau was dry executions of musical theories. That last one prompts loud guffaws in Tempesta circles: Rameau was a cantankerous adventurer, and one need not listen long to his music to know that.

"If you hear something like 'Vivaldi wrote the same piece 100 times' or 'Telemann is all quantity and no quality,' " Roberts says, "all I want to do is question it, and say, 'Really? Is there something we're missing here?' "

And the answer is usually some version of "yes."

Tempesta di Mare

8 p.m. Saturday in the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets

Tickets: $28-$38

Information: 215-893-1999 or www.tempestadimare.org

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