Early Music America Spring 2013 - (Page 39)

“Tempesta is the only American group to advance Fasch in the musical world, and their involvement and sustained commitment are pretty much unique.” —Steven Zohn advantage of congruence of personnel and non-Fasch repertoire to keep costs down. Chandos agreed. Funders stepped up to the plate, led by The Pew Charitable Trust’s Philadelphia Music Project and the William Penn Foundation. Three years later, the second CD, Fasch Orchestral Works, Vol. 2, appeared, and Vol. 3 a year later. In the four years intervening since that ﬁrst concert, Philadelphia audiences and radio broadcast audiences around the world got a chance to hear Fasch in context with his contemporaries on programs that included Telemann, Bach, Rameau, and Rebel. An extraordinary invitation from the International Fasch Festival in Zerbst took the entire orchestra overseas in spring 2011. “We’ve had many prestigious orchestras at the Fasch Festival over the years, from Britain, Italy, Belgium, and, of course, Germany,” says musicologist Barbara Reul, then president of the Zerbst-based International Fasch Society, which has spearheaded the Fasch revival since the 1980s. “Tempesta di Mare is the ﬁrst American orchestra we’ve ever invited, and, frankly, there were doubts—until they played. The crowd was spellbound. Everybody agreed that it was the best concert we’ve ever had at the Fasch Festival.” “The crowd came together in a chorus of rhythmic clapping at the end to get us to play an encore.” Roberts says. “We ﬁnished the evening with a Fasch fugue that coincidentally takes the theme from Rocky as its subject—perfect for South Philadelphia’s Baroque orchestra.” “Tempesta is the only American group to advance Fasch in the musical world, and their involvement and sustained commitment are pretty much unique,” says Steven Zohn, musicologist and author of Music for a Mixed Taste, Genre and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (Oxford, 2008). “They’ve done a great service, to thrust Fasch back into the spotlight and keep it on him for a while.” A new generation of scholars and performers eager to learn more about Fasch makes this an exciting time for the once-overlooked composer. New research reveals an increasingly complex musical ﬁgure as an essential contact among his contemporaries and a key ﬁgure in 18th-century musical developments. The Fasch effect In their eight years of Fasch immersion, Tempesta di Mare matured. The organization grew. More important, playing Fasch for such a prolonged and intense stretch of time provided immense musical returns for the entire ensemble. “I hadn’t played Fasch before, I don’t think any of us really had.” says Emlyn Ngai. “Because we had so few precedents, we had to learn his style, his language, his manner of writing as a group, and make decisions together on how to deﬁne him as a composer. And because it was a long project, we could keep going back to revisit those decisions. “With all that thought and searching around musically, we’ve become stronger musicians,” he says. “We have a freshness that we can take even to music that’s well known. We can look at it as if we were seeing it for the ﬁrst time.” Tempesta di Mare bade farewell to the Fasch project in March 2012 in a program that included Fasch with other composers who had never appeared on the series before—Kusser, Endler, Stölzel, and Locatelli. Their ﬁrst show of the 2012-13 season went back to basics. It included the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4. It was a satisfying performance. It sounded new. I Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia. Early Music America Spring 2013 39

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Early Music America Spring 2013

Editor's Note
Reader Forum
Sound Bytes
Profile: Peter Nothnagle Early Music Engineer
Musings: Best of the Year
Recording Reviews
"Skillful Singing" and the Prelude in Renaissance Italy
Almira: Handel's Fountain of Youth?
Tempesta di Mare: Making a Splash with Fasch
2013 Guide: Workshops & Festivals
What I Did at Summer Camp
Book Reviews
Ad Index
In Conclusion: Teaching Recitative in Mexico

Early Music America Spring 2013