Tempesta di Mare: Four Baroque entertainments

Baroque music languished in obscurity between 1800 and 1950 because it failed to satisfy the expectations aroused by 19th-Century orchestral music. It didn't thunder like Beethoven, nor did it convey profound emotions with big masses of sound, like Tchaikovsky and Brahms.

Much of Baroque music can best be described as entertainment. But it was entertainment created for highly civilized people with solid musical backgrounds.

Tempesta di Mare devoted its last concert of the season to four examples of Baroque entertainments.

A role for Louis XIV

Telemann's orchestral piece, Burlesque de Quixotte, is one of my all-time Baroque favorites. The American Society of Ancient Instruments used to play it every now and then with five viols and a harpsichord. Tempesta's 20- piece orchestra, complete with woodwinds and percussion, magnified the humor in Telemann's mock charges and gallops. The Don's sighs for Dulcinea acquired extra pathos when they were produced by woodwinds instead of strings.

Purcell's The Fairy Queen and Charpentier's The Imaginary Invalid were both court entertainments. The Fairy Queen was a masque— a mixture of speech, song, dance, costumes and spectacle that flourished in England in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The Imaginary Invalid was a comic ballet, a form invented by Molière that often included a role for Louis XIV.

Rameau's Ballet Music from Pygmalion was a theater ballet based on the story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in a love with a statue that Cupid brings to life— a story that achieved some fame in the20th Century as My Fair Lady.

Hypochondriac as doctor

The French pieces contain passages that can only be appreciated if you know the story. In The Imaginary Invalid, for example, the hypochondriac sees so many doctors that he receives a medical degree, and Charpentier provides a special Air for Curtsying for the medical personnel who congratulate him.

But most of the suites consist of airs and dances capable of standing alone. The impresarios behind the productions seized every opportunity to introduce crowd-pleasers like Moorish dancers, dancing monkeys and a generous assortment of hornpipes, jigs and rondos.

Tempesta di Mare's musicians once again wielded their period instruments with skill and grace, without benefit of a conductor. These were all ensemble pieces, with no solo roles, but I especially liked the passages for multiple sopranino recorders and the percussion contributed by Michelle Humphreys. And I was fascinated by the way an orchestra without a single brass instrument somehow managed to create the illusion that trumpets were concealed in its midst.