Tempesta di Mare will open its 2018-19 concert season on Saturday, Oct. 6, at 5 p.m. with “Purcell Fantasias” in the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting House. Clockwise from the top right, the pictured members are Heloise Degrugillier, Priscilla Herreid, Rainer Beckman and Gwyn Roberts. (Photo courtesy of Ulrike Shapiro)[/caption]

by Michael Caruso

Tempesta di Mare, the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, will open its 2018-19 concert season Saturday, Oct. 6, at 5 p.m. with “Purcell Fantasias” in the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting House, 20 East Mermaid Lane. The first of three in the ensemble’s “Artist Recital Series,” it features a recorder quartet comprised of Gwyn Roberts, Heloise Degrugillier, Priscilla Herreid and Rainer Beckman.

Roberts, co-director of Tempesta along with lutenist Richard Stone, explained the program’s genesis. “The Purcell Fantazias (that’s how he spelled it) share some interesting features with Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue;’ both are sets of music written by a brilliant composer in a form that had gone out of fashion decades earlier, and both survive in score form rather than separate part books for the four performers, without any indication of what instruments the composer intended.

“But there are also wonderful differences. Fugues are rigorous compositions full of rules, while the idea of a fantazia is explicitly free. Purcell infuses these pieces with variety and invention. There are cheerful sections and somber sections, crunchy dissonances and sweet sonorities, flights of virtuosity and chorale-like meditative moments.

“After the great pleasure we four recorder players had playing ‘Art of the Fugue’ together last year, we named our group New World Recorders and decided to make this an ongoing enterprise. The ‘Purcell Fantazias’ is a natural fit for out next project together.”

Roberts pointed out that Purcell composed his four-part Fantazias in the summer of 1680 when he was 20 years old. He dated each one; he wrote seven of them between June 10 and 30 and the remaining two on Aug. 19 and 31.

According to Roberts, “Purcell didn’t specify any particular instruments, and the ranges of the parts are unconventional for a consort of viols. Perhaps he intended them for members of the violin family or for a mixed ensemble of various instruments. Or perhaps he was more interested in just writing and exploring the possibilities of the form without thinking of having them performed by anyone at all. This last idea is suggested by the fact that only scores survive rather than part books, and it would have been difficult for a quartet of any sort of stringed instruments to read from just a single score together, squinting to see the small notes and turning pages as necessary while bowing.

“I do think that the intertwined nature of the music works best on a set of similar instruments. So why not play them on recorders? Recorders were enormously popular in England at the time, right alongside viols. All we have to do in order to play the Fantazias on recorders is take some of the notes up or down an octave so that they fit in our range – a common practice then and now.”

For more information call 215-755-8776 or visit www.tempestadimare.org

VIVA OPERA

My concert-going weekend was framed by two operatic events. The Academy of Vocal Arts welcomed its seven new students with a “New Artists Recital” Thursday and Friday evenings, Sept. 20 & 21, in its own Warden Theater. Opera Philadelphia opened its production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” Friday evening in the Academy of Music. I caught AVA’s recital on Friday and then took in Opera Philadelphia’s mounting Sunday, Sept. 23.

With vocal coach Jose Menendez at the Steinway accompanying AVA’s young vocalists, the roster of pieces that were sung leaned heavily in the direction of lighter fare rather than dramatic operatic heavyweights. And yet, the program worked well both as a performance and as a sonic window looking into the future at AVA, the only full-scholarship post-graduate school in the U.S. solely devoted to the study of singing.

Soprano Renee Richardson of nearby Springfield, Montgomery County, made a sophisticated impression in “L’invitation au voyage” by Henri Duparc and a passionate one in Moses Hogan’s touching arrangement of “Give Me Jesus.” Her singing recalled the burnished timbres of Leontyne Price. Baritone Timothy Murray invested George Svidirov’s Russian language “To Nanny” and “The Virgin in the City” with the appropriate darkness of color. Soprano Kara Mulder of Philadelphia gave towering renditions of Claude Debussy’s “Apparition” and Ernest Charles’ “When I Have Sung My Songs,” offering a tonal clarity reminiscent of Birgit Nilsson. And bass Lev Voronov’s singing in Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Only One Who Knows Longing” (better known in America as “None But the Lonely Heart”) was a premonition of many a great “basso profundo” operatic role.

AVA will next present the “Giargiari Bel Canto Competition” Friday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m. in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater. Next on the roster is the Puccini double bill of “Suor Angelica” and “Le Villi” Nov. 3-27. For more details, call 215-735-1685 or visit www.avaopera.org

‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’

Sir Walter Scott’s novel, “The Bride of Lammermoor,” can certainly be described as grim. The same can be said for the libretto Salvadore Cammarano provided Gaetano Donizetti for his operatic version, “Lucia di Lammermoor.” But the “look” of Opera Philadelphia’s production of the work so far transcended “grim” that it recalled the company’s several decades-ago gray-on-gray production of Bizet’s “Carmen” that lost one quarter of its subscribers in just one season.

Visually unappealing operatic mountings can somehow survive the test of performance if the musical side of the equation is absolutely stellar. But that wasn’t the case Sunday afternoon in the beautifully and comfortably updated Academy of Music. Conductor Corrado Rovaris led the Orchestra effectively, and the Chorus sang well, even if it tended to mill around aimlessly. But Laurent Pelly’s stage direction was hopelessly melodramatic and Chantal Thomas’ set design took minimalism to the point of “poverty row.” Unfortunately, the singing wasn’t sufficiently brilliant to balance the theatrical negatives.

The chief disappointment was soprano Brenda Rae in the title role. Having come to “Lucia” through Metropolitan Opera performances and recordings featuring the late (and great) Dame Joan Sutherland, I was more than a little surprised that Rae not only offered none of the traditional coloratura embellishments on the vocal line but even eliminated the famous “arpeggio duet” with the flute in the famous “Mad Scene.” Plus her characterization started out so near to open lunacy that there was virtually no room left on the spectrum of emotional disturbance for her to travel once she recognizes her brother’s betrayal for what it really was.

Tenor Michael Spyres was more successful as Edgardo, Lucia’s beloved and her brother’s mortal enemy. His tentative upper register was taxed nearly to the breaking point here and there, but he sang with both beauty and passion and caught the gist of an unfairly jilted lover. Baritone Troy Cook was a serviceable Enrico, Lucia’s venal brother, but bass-baritone Christian Van Horn stole the show as Raimondo, Lucia’s not-so-wise adviser. He acted with commanding presence and sang with limitless power and admirable elegance.

Sad to say, but the whole affair reminded me of what Tennessee Williams had Maggie say in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”: “You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it.” I couldn’t help but think when considering the painfully limited budget for the physical side of this production: “You can sometimes do theater without money, but you can’t do opera without it.”

Opera Philadelphia’s production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” continues in the Academy of Music through Oct. 30.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net. To read more of NOTEWORTHY, visit www.chestnuthilllocal.com/Arts/Noteworthy