Tempesta di Mare's "Characters of the Dance'

Tempesta di Mare's imaginative co-directors based their "Characters of the Dance" program on an inspired theme. They preceded Bach's First Orchestral Suite with two pieces that contained examples of the Baroque dances that Bach elaborated in the suite.

To Bach's contemporaries, dances like the sarabande and the gavotte would have been familiar acquaintances. Their knowledge would have affected the way they listened to his complex, multi-voiced orchestral versions.

I became intimately familiar with most of the Baroque dance forms in the days when I amused myself by tootling into a recorder. But Tempesta's program notes filled some annoying gaps in my expertise.

I've never been quite sure what a rigaudon is, for example. Now I can go to sleep at night knowing it's "nearly indistinguishable" from one of my favorite Baroque morale lifters, the irrepressibly bouncy bouree.

Hyperactive ballet

The program's first half illustrated the dances with a ballet score by the French court composer Jean-Fery Rebel and a suite by Johann Friedrich Fasch— the long-lost Baroque composer Tempesta di Mare has been reviving.

The Rebel is a hyperactive tour de force that runs through 12 dance forms in a single nonstop movement. Concertmaster Emlyn Ngai punctuated the gallop with some high-speed violin solos that he executed with his customary flair and unflappable demeanor.

The Fasch suite, like the Bach, is an entry in a Baroque tradition of orchestral pieces based on French dance music. Tempesta gave it a reading that included a properly sprightly bouree; a nervous, lively hornpipe; and a minuet that emphasized that form's courtly, processional qualities.

Why Bach still rules

Good as these pieces were, you knew the program had jumped to a higher league as soon you heard the first notes of the Bach suite. There's a reason why Bach is the reigning champion of the High Baroque.

Polyphony is one of the major distinguishing characteristics of the Baroque, and nobody produced scores that are more complex and varied than Bach's. Throughout most of the suite, whatever dance type he's playing with, you can hear several voices simultaneously doing different things. When Bach does place one of the sections in the foreground, it's usually teamed with a counterparty that's doing something entirely different.

Modern orchestras sometimes make the first suite sound smooth and bland. Tempesta's Baroque instruments emphasized the contrasts between the different sections and produced a performance in which you could hear every voice all the time.

For each dance, a personality

Tempesta combined the polyphony with lively tempos and interpretations that highlighted each dance's special personality. The result was a spellbinder that held your attention from the first note to the final chord.

I was especially charmed by the trio in Bach's minuet movement. Emlyn Nagy, principal second violin Karina Fox, and principal viola Danielle Giulia Pierson created a touching, gently romantic interlude.

But the trio was just one event in a stream of pleasures. The entire company turned in one of the best performances of the first suite I've heard, from the oboes at the top of the score through the all-important foundation supplied by bass player Anne Peterson.

Beethoven in the wings

The second half included two Fasch pieces that departed from the dance theme: a four-movement sinfonia and a fugue excerpted from a suite. Fasch was an innovator whose music often foreshadows the romantic opuses of the 19th Century, and the sinfonia opens with a massive orchestral thump thump thump that immediately bounces you out of the 18th Century's aesthetics. It isn't Beethoven, but Beethoven's obviously waiting in the wings.

The fugue ended the afternoon with a piece that proved Fasch shared Bach's zest for all the complex possibilities created by the human brain's ability to hear several sounds simultaneously. The fugue's main theme even suggests that Fasch's prescience extended into the second half of the 20th Century.

I'm probably the only Philadelphian who has never seen Rocky, but Tempesta's co-directors assure me that the fugue theme is the identical twin of the theme that accompanied Rocky Balboa up the steps of the Art Museum.

But that raises a question. Fasch's water-damaged manuscripts were still languishing in a German vault when Sylvester Stallone first became America's most famous pugilist. How did Rocky composer Bill Conti lift a theme from a lost opus? Mysteries abound.