Singer Susan Graham

by Michael Caruso

The Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players return to Chestnut Hill Sunday, Jan. 22, 4 p.m., in the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. Their program is entitled “Sara and Her Sisters” and focuses on music connected to four German-Jewish siblings: Sara Itzig and her sisters Bella, Fanny and Zippora. All four had direct and personal connections with members of the Bach family as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Berlin-based sisters’ father, Daniel, was finance minister to the musically gifted King Frederick the Great of Prussia. Sara Itzig studied harpsichord with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and a noted composer in his own right. Bella Itzig Salomon’s grandson was Felix Mendelssohn, the early romantic composer who launched the first “Bach Revival” in the 1830s when he was named to Bach’s post in Leipzig.

It was Bella who gave the score of Bach’s magnificent “St. Matthew Passion” to Mendelssohn, which sparked his interest in the elder Bach’s music. Bella’s collection of music included works by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, another son of Johann Sebastian who became a noted composer. Tempesta harpsichordist Adam Pearl will perform his Rondo in D minor. Fanny Itzig von Arnstein moved to Vienna, where one of the lodgers in her house was none other than the young Mozart.

Sunday afternoon’s concert includes works by W.F. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch and Johann Nepomuk Wendt. For more information, visit www.tempestadimare.org.

PARIS FESTIVAL

Music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin opened the Philadelphia Orchestra’s three-week “City of Light and Music: The Paris Festival” with three concerts Jan. 12-14 in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall. His soloist for the this first set of programs was mezzo Susan Graham, who was heard in seven selections from Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne.”

Canteloube, who lived from 1879 until 1957, was a part of the early 20th century movement to save European folk music that gained particular strength following the cataclysm of World War I between the years 1914 and 1918. Even before the “War to End All Wars” broke out, there was a sense among classical composers that the migration of country people to the big cities was having the unintended result that much of the folk music upon which classical music had traditionally been based was being lost. The general carnage of the Great War and the dismemberment of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires at its conclusion hastened this trend.

Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly canvassed the Hungarian and Romanian countryside for inspiration; Falla, Albeniz and Granados employed Spanish folk tunes and modes in their music; Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holt catalogued English folk songs and canticles; and Canteloube retrieved songs from the Auvergne section of central France and rescued them from certain oblivion.

From the countless folk songs he heard in his travels, Canteloube assembled and orchestrated two sets between the years 1923 and 1930, coloring their accompaniments to flavor and enhance the sound of their original language, neither French nor Spanish. The music bears the imprint of the late romantic and impressionist styles that surrounded his endeavors.

The “Songs of the Auvergne” recall late Puccini, Debussy and Ravel in their “Spanish modes” and Respighi in such scores as “Pines of Rome,” Fountains of Rome” and the suites of “Ancient Airs and Dances.” In their overall mood of elegiac melancholy, they recall Marcel Proust’s “A la recherché du temps perdu” (“Remembrance of Things Past” or “In Search of Lost Time”).

I first heard the “Songs of the Auvergne” on an LP featuring the incomparable Spanish/Catalan soprano Victoria de los Angeles, a series of interpretations that set the standard for me. Her creamy tone was spiced by tart inflections and an appreciation for the timbre of their distinctive dialect.

Although not quite as definitive, the recording featuring American mezzo Frederica von Stade from the 1980s and subsequent performances with the Philadelphians and Charles Dutoit at the Mann Center were equally unforgettable. The clarity of von Stade’s tone and diction that was communicated by intensely intimate phrasing cut to the heart of the music’s nostalgic evocation of a pastoral past.

Perhaps I was expecting too much, but I can’t deny having been very disappointed by Friday evening’s performance from mezzo Susan Graham. Her singing barely projected beyond the front of the stage in Verizon Hall even when its dynamic level was loud; when it was intended to be soft, it was lost amid Cantaloube’s sumptuous orchestration and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s lustrous rendition of it.

And, no, Maestro Nezet-Seguin wasn’t eliciting playing from the Philadelphians that was too loud for his soloist. She simply wasn’t producing the requisite amplitude of sound for the size of the hall. Nor did she project either the emotions that animated the music or the colors that were needed to delineate them. All that did manage to come across was a vibrato verging on a wobble, whereas the vibratos of both de los Angeles and von Stade were focused and controlled.

The remainder of the program was so slight that it failed to make up for its principal disappointment.

Contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net