Tempesta di Mare restores Telemann, Fasch and Janitsch

Tempesta di Mare ended its ninth season with three pieces that illustrate the combination of scholarship and musicianship that maintains the liveliness and unpredictability of today's early music scene.

The evening's main event, Telemann's Ino cantata, normally receives performances based on a score copied after the composer died. But during their trip to Germany last month, Tempesta's artistic directors, Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, consulted an earlier score that hadn't previously been available and examined partbooks from a World War II Red Army collection recently returned to Germany. The result was a new performing edition, presumably more faithful to the composer's intentions.

Telemann wrote Ino in the 1760s, when he was in his 80s, but it plays like something a younger man might have written a century later. Most Baroque works based on Greek legends take a detached attitude toward their subject. They're essentially fairy tales set in a magical, charming never-never land. Ino, on the other hand, takes its subject seriously.

Jupiter's jealous wife, Hera, pursues the woman her husband has seduced with all the fury of a character out of grand opera. She arranges to have Jupiter's inamorata, Semele, die in childbirth. She curses Semele's sister and the sister's husband with madness because they dared to adopt the offspring of Jupiter's dalliance.

Telemann dressed the story in music that was so passionate that at times I thought Laura Heimes must be singing in Italian, not German. Heimes gave the piece an all-out treatment, immersing herself in the characters as if playing a full-dress opera instead of a cantata. She went a bit too far once or twice, but Ino is one of those pieces in which it's probably best to err on the side of too much, rather than too little.

Rehabilitating Fasch

The program's first item, a Concerto for Orchestra by Johann Friedrich Fasch, repeated a piece that Tempesta has played before as part of its continuing revival of Fasch's work. Roberts and Stone have been restoring Fasch's scores with computer-enhanced copies of manuscripts that were water-damaged during World War II.

The Fasch's most notable characteristic is the way it plays with combinations of winds and strings. The third movement is packed with musical pleasures. Horn passages, jaunty violin interludes and interplays between the strings and the flute create a stream of music that rushes toward an end all too soon.

First performance in centuries

The program's second item, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch's Ouverture Grosso for double orchestra, was a piece that Roberts and Stone discovered during their explorations of the Red Army archive. Tempesta di Mare's weekend audiences heard the concerto's "modern world premiere"— its first performances since the Baroque era.

For his Ouverture Grosso, Janitsch divided his orchestra into two units and produced a real-life stereo effect, with the violins in each section answering each other across the hall. He enhanced the contrast between the two orchestras by assigning the oboe and bassoons to one side and the flutes to the other.

A less assertive horn

Tempesta's musicians produced the quality performances their audiences have come to expect. Concertmaster Emlyn Ngai handled several solo passages for violin with his usual flair. But the scene-stealers on this outing were the horn players, Todd Williams and Aleks Ozolins.

The valveless natural horn is one of the most difficult instruments a musician can take up, but its presence adds a distinctively Baroque sound that makes it worth the trouble. It's not as brassy as a modern horn, and its tone is less rounded— a combination that makes it feel richer and less assertive.

The evening ended with the feel-good conclusion to Telemann's above-mentioned Ino. Neptune arrives in a rush of musical pageantry, complete with horns, and turns the title character into an immortal. And the whole orchestra, with the horns once again prominent, creates a vision of the paradise in which Ino will spend eternity. Can you think of a better way to end a Friday night at the Arch Street Meeting House?