Tempesta's 2024-25 Concert Season to Open With STOLEN This Month

Tempesta’s 2024-25 concert season will open on October 5 & 6 with STOLEN: Handel, Keiser, and a lifetime of musical borrowings from a suitcase of pilfered music. Performed by the award-winning, self-led baroque orchestra, concerts take place at Trinity Center for Urban Life and the Presbyterian Church Chestnut Hill respectively.
 
It is a well-known fact that Georg Frideric Handel, famous for his Messiah, Water Music and other concert darlings from the baroque, stole other composers’ music for his own use. But the theft referred to in this original program by Tempesta is not about intellectual property. Rather, Handel perpetrated a burglary of physical items. The person he stole from was his then-employer, the composer Reinhard Keiser; and what he helped himself to was reams of music that Keiser had composed. Handel then shamelessly used these very scores in his own compositions!
 
Tempesta di Mare, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, will perform scores by Handel and Keiser with an ensemble of woodwinds, strings and continuo. Keiser’s suite from Hercules and Hebe (Hamburg, 1699) is preceded by the Air of Handel’s Water Music in G (London, 1736), which is a direct quote from an Aria in that Keiser suite.
 
The program also includes works by both Keiser and Handel in which they quote with abandon from themselves. No issues of copyright here!
 
Full program details are provided below.
 
Other original programs in the 2024-25 season include a chamber program, Ostinato, featuring the Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players in chaconnes, canons, grounds and variations by Vivaldi, Purcell, Marais, Boismortier, and Blow, and Faustina & Santina: The Venetian Divas of Handel, Hasse & Veracini, with mezzo-soprano Meg Bragle and Gabriela Estephanie Solís, and narration by Gwyn Roberts.
 
A Neapolitan Christmas, with Rebecca Myers, soprano, and Bach’s Trio Sonatas reimagined for chamber ensemble round out the mainstage season.
 
The season also includes two artist recitals with flavors of their own: Lute Duets by Silvius Silvester Weiss performed by Tempesta co-director Richard Stone and Cameron Welke of Duo Silvio, and Revolution!, a program of songs and music from the Francis Hopkinson Collection, with soprano Julianne Baird and harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff.
 
All programs will be performed in Center City Philadelphia and Chestnut Hill, with three of our project receiving a third performance in Wilmington, DE.