Corona del Mar’s Baroque Festival Clings to Salad Days

Sometimes you can learn important lessons about life from a lowly salad.

Burton Karson, a professor of music at Cal State Fullerton and artistic director of the annual Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival that ends today, sees a forkful of significant truth in the Cobb salad.

The Cobb was a concoction named after the original chef of the legendary Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. You’ll see something called “Cobb salad” sprouting up on menus everywhere these days. Too often, Karson says, what you get resembles the original in name only.

A man who loves fine food nearly as much as he loves music, Karson finds nothing wrong with other kinds of salads. His beef, as it were, is with the restaurateurs who promise one thing then plant something else in front of you. When he orders a Cobb, he expects a Cobb.

A bit of that Wisdom of the Cobb might be found underlying Karson’s earnest but decidedly modest festival. Karson doesn’t promise the musical world, just one very specific piece of it. And that’s exactly what he delivers.

Spread out each year over four nights in June, the festival revels in the music of Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Albinoni and their contemporaries. Tonight’s closing concert, a performance by the Festival Singers & Orchestra, will take place in the intimate, living room-like St. Michael and All Angels Church. Two midweek events were held at the pastoral Sherman Library and Gardens.

Refreshingly, in this period of onward-and-upward, bigger-is-better cultural activities around the county, the organizers of the 7-year-old Baroque Music Festival remain perfectly content to stay where they are.

No big drives to pay for a move into the Orange County Performing Arts Center or for superstar headliners. No garish ad campaigns (“more than 250 costume changes!”). No pre-concert spotlights or colored, helium-filled balloons.

At Sunday’s initial concert, the sole offering was the music, plus a bit of historical background when appropriate. Karson scheduled several solo organ pieces played by John Walker and concertos composed by Handel, Bach-Vivaldi, Sammartini and Michel Corrette, performed by the Festival Orchestra.

Karson’s trend-bucking rationale? “This was something we started for the community of Corona del Mar, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”

But Dr. Karson! Isn’t this the age when everything--from concert halls to coffeepots--must be computer-controlled and electronically synthesized? When no expense is spared, and every creation must be state of the art?

Heck, Sylvester Stallone’s fans feel downright cheated if the budget for his latest movie doesn’t exceed the gross national product of at least half the countries in the Free World.

Fortunately, Rambo hasn’t discovered Baroque music yet. (Odds are just 50-50 that he could pronounce it.)

Granted, those accouterment-conscious members of the crowd may find some aspects of the festival wanting. St. Michael and All Angels Church is far from acoustically perfect. Stained-glass windows, opened to permit ventilation, also let the noise of street traffic intrude from time to time. Cold air blowing in aggravated intonation problems for the struggling string players. And the hardwood pews left something to be desired in terms of creature comforts.

But in the long run, maybe the hundred or so people listening got a little closer to the intent and original spirit of this music than they would have in loftier, flashier surroundings.

It could certainly be argued that a limited audience for Baroque music might preclude a big-bucks approach. Maybe the promoters couldn’t get this festival into the Performing Arts Center if they wanted to. Still, it’s not impossible to imagine a group sending out the call for $100,000 or so, ringing up James Galway or Jean-Pierre Rampal.

Voila! Instant 17th-Century sideshow.

The Pacific Symphony is running something like $250,000 in the red this year, and there has been talk of a merger between the county’s two major choral groups, primarily for financial reasons. They are paying the price of playing the opulent Center.

What’s important to remember, though--and Karson obviously does--is that much of the music of the Baroque period was composed for and performed in comparatively intimate spaces: small churches, coffeehouses, even taverns.

At Sunday’s concert, I found myself wondering what listeners 300 years ago must have thought upon first hearing Bach’s transcription for organ of one of Vivaldi’s violin concertos.

Or how 17th-Century churchgoers, or members of the Italian court, reacted to the jarring chromaticisms of Girolamo Frescobaldi’s “Toccata V,” music that continues to defy the stereotype of Baroque composition as ordered and reserved.

Such rewards of this festival are modest ones--as modest as its claims.

Maybe Corona del Mar can’t boast of its supreme gourmet feast of Baroque music. But it can be rightfully proud that it is home to the musical equivalent of a good Cobb salad.