Tempesta di Mare’s season finale

The three pieces were tied together by their musical depictions of the classic four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. Marin Marais’s 1706 opera Alcyone exposes its characters to the perils of the sea. Telemann’s 1736 “Hamburg Ebb and Flow” celebrated the 100th anniversary of the sea forces that guarded Hamburg’s maritime trade. Jean-Féry Rebel’s 1737 ballet Les Elements depicted the emergence of the elements from chaos — a very modern subject, even though our current worldview includes a different, somewhat larger set of elements.

The charming quality of this music is no accident. It was created for productions that were meant to divert and entertain. Alcyone includes a march for sailors and a happy jig, even though Marais called the opera a tragédie en musique (it ends with the heroine killing herself because her fiancé died at sea). Like most 18th- and 19th-century opera composers, Marais didn’t waste an opportunity for a lively musical bit.

It’s also music that must be played on the Baroque instruments that Tempesta prefers. Modern strings would have sounded too smooth. Modern woodwinds would have sounded too brilliant.

Tempesta fielded a full Baroque orchestra — Baroque winds and strings, recorders, Baroque flutes and oboes, a Baroque bassoon, some small-scale percussion, and a harpsichord reinforced by the long-necked lute played by co-director Richard Stone. In the Marais work, the violins were divided into three sections, instead of the two used nowadays, and the violas into two. The extra voices created a more complex texture, but they must have increased the demands on the musicians — especially since they were playing Baroque style, without a conductor.

When a passage drags

The second half opened with one of the most striking introductions any composer has ever imagined, before or since. Rebel opened Les Elements with a huge blast of sound, representing chaos, that sounded like it had been composed for a Hitchcock film. He created this startling, unexpectedly chilling effect by sounding all seven notes of the D minor scale at once. All the basic building blocks of music slam into the audience simultaneously, clashing and harmonizing with no attempt at organization. It’s a musical conception that sounds just as contemporary as our modern scientific picture of the simplest elements emerging from the chaos that followed the Big Bang.

In any group of suites taken from theatrical productions, one or two pieces are bound to seem draggy without the singing and dancing that originally accompanied them. In Baroque suites, the sections are so short that you can sit through a dull spot secure in the knowledge that something new will come along very soon. The three suites in this concert included 30 sections. The forms included lively dances like the gavotte and the canarie, slower dances like the sarabande, and complex forms like the chaconne.

The orchestration added more variety. High violins represented fire. Flutes and recorders played bird songs. Winds and strings played against each other in inventive combinations.

In addition to her work with tambourine, castanets, and a small drum, percussionist Michelle Humphreys created the tempest in Alcyone by rolling a long decorated cloth across a hand-cranked cylinder. I don’t know if that’s an authentic Baroque instrument, but it definitely created authentic wind sounds.

Up from Arch Street

For the encore, Tempesta repeated a section of Les Elements that summed up the evening’s best features — the tambourine movement that represents water. As the cellos and basses maintained the steady beat of the tambourine theme, racing passages on high violins and flutes alternated with memorable solos for Anna Marsh’s Baroque bassoon. It was a perfect evocation of a flowing river, rushing through narrows and slowing in broader areas, and it was a perfect ending for Tempesta’s season.

Like most local chamber and early music groups, Tempesta di Mare usually plays in venues like the Arch Street Friends Meeting House, where it holds most of its concerts nowadays. Churches and Quaker meetinghouses make perfectly satisfactory concert halls, but appearances in the Kimmel Center expose Philadelphia musical organizations to a larger local audience. Tempesta di Mare has achieved a worldwide reputation with its recordings and tours, but it isn’t as well-known in Philadelphia as it should be — even though it carefully tells the world it is the Tempesta di Mare Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra. Co-director Gwyn Roberts added a welcome touch to this concert when she announced that Tempesta will return to the Perelman next season.