Preview:
Art of the Prophets
glorious German vocal and instrumental music from the generation before J.S. Bach
December 8 & 9

The Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players, with vocal soloists Laura Heimes, soprano, Jennifer Lane, alto, Aaron Sheehan, tenor and David Newman, perform Art of the Prophets, glorious German vocal and instrumental music from the generation before J.S. Bach, on December 8 in Center City and December 9 in Chestnut Hill.

If you like the Pachelbel  Canon,
you’ll love the music in
Art of the
Prophets.

–

Art of the Prophets

glorious German vocal and instrumental music
from the generation before JS Bach

Art of the Prophets graphic

image credit: Andy Kahl, et al.

pre-concert talks by social historian Tanya Kevorkian

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Click to hear soundclip of another piece by Philipp Heinrich Erlebach:

performed by Tempesta di Mare, October 2008.
 
A new generation of composers emerged from the devastation following the Thirty Years War, redefining German music with ravishing results. Art of the Prophets showcases some of the finest examples of the era, with spiritual and secular music by Nicolaus Bruhns, Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, Johann Rosenmüller, and Johann Christoph Bach (J.S. Bach’s cousin). If you like the Pachelbel Canon, you’ll love the music by his contemporaries in Art of the Prophets.

A new generation of composers emerged from the devestation following the Thirty Years War, redefining German music with ravishing results

Bruhns’ joyous and florid setting of Psalm 100, “Jauchzet dem Herren,” a tour-de-force for tenor and strings that opens the program, could nearly represent the breadth and daring of this wonderful period of music all on its own. Erlebach’s Ouverture III, modeled after Lully’s dance music for the spectacles of Versailles, gives the clearest inklings that the German orchestral suite was about to come into its own as a genre.  Rosenmüller’s “O dives omnium bonarum,” for alto and violas, meditates on texts by Saint Augustine with a burnished, deep-sounding texture. Pez’s Concerto Pastorale, for recorders and strings, celebrates the nativity in the new-fashioned Roman flavor. Finally, in the wedding cantata, “Meine Freundin, du bist schön,” for soprano and bass, Johann Christoph Bach sets strains from the Song of Songs so voluptuously as to disprove any notion that his young cousin, Johann Sebastian, was the first Bach to reveal sensuality in Lutheran Protestantism.

Social historian Tanya Kevorkian, author of Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750 and history professor at Millersville University, will give pre-concert talks on the reemergence of music and celebration in Germany after the Thirty Years War. Each talk will start one hour before the concert.

This program is supported in part by an ArtWorks Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.