Piffaro, Tempesta di Mare, and Choral Arts team up

In spite of that gap in instruments and styles, they managed to team up with Choral Arts Philadelphia for a three-way collaboration that brought out the best in all three organizations. Piffaro’s instruments added new colors to Tempesta’s, Tempesta’s added new colors to Piffaro’s, and the 13 early music pros from Choral Arts added a third spectrum to the palette.

Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow

Some Christmas music soars. Some bounces. This event mostly featured music that glows. The intermingling of voices and two types of instruments produced a warm jewel that continually exposed new facets.

When was the last time you heard a violin-trombone trio? One of the most striking — and poetic — passages in the entire concert was an interlude in which Tempesta’s concertmaster, Emlyn Ngai, interacted with Piffaro’s two sackbut players, Adam Bregman and Greg Ingles. (The older form of the trombone, the sackbut, is a bit mellower than its modern descendant.)

The three organizations made a critical decision when they decided to base the program on Advent music played at the royal chapel in Leipzig in 1619 — a date on the cusp between the Renaissance and the Baroque. Europeans didn’t yell “Yippee, we’re in a new musical period!” and switch to harpsichords and Baroque violins on New Year’s Eve 1600. The boundaries between periods are fuzzy zones, and there's always some overlap.

The cusp between Renaissance and Baroque

The three master composers featured on the program all straddled the line dividing the periods. Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) is usually associated with the Renaissance, while Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) and Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654) are usually considered Baroque composers. All three composed for the royal chapel around 1619.

Praetorius may have been the senior citizen in the triumvirate, but he contributed two of the most effective works on the program. The finale for the first half was a setting of Awake the watchmen’s voices call in which his music captured the rush and excitement of a big announcement racing through a community. The main event in the second half was a Magnificat in which he seemed to give every line a different musical treatment, each calling for a new combination of voices and instruments.

Piffaro’s co-directors, Joan Kimball and Robert Wiemken, share a valuable trait with Matthew Glandorf, the director of Choral Arts: They all like to present concerts that place the music on the program in its historical context. This concert followed the general pattern of a 17th-century Lutheran church service, complete with two sections in which the audience joined in a Lutheran chorale. As Wiemken pointed out, the addition of responses by the congregation was one of Luther’s major reforms.

The Friday night performance of this concert took place at the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul. When the music on the program was composed, the ancestors of modern Euro-Americans were killing each other over issues like the role of the laity in the church service. Today a group of musicians can stage a simulation of a Lutheran service in a Catholic cathedral and we can all listen to it, because the music transcends the furies of the age that produced it. There’s an appropriate holiday message in that, but it’s so obvious it doesn’t need to be spelled out.