MUSIC REVIEW : Baroque Splendor Fails to Shine Reliably in La Jolla Program

The local audience for Renaissance and Baroque music has never been large, unless one includes in that category the annual Yuletide assaults on Handel’s “Messiah.”

But, despite such modest public enthusiasm, the San Diego Early Music Society sponsors a laudable series of concerts each season, usually featuring imported early-music groups.

Sunday evening at the La Jolla Congregational Church, the society closed its current season with an all-Monteverdi program, a heavy dose of the 17th-Century Italian composer’s ecclesiastical odes and recreational madrigals.

The performance by two local ensembles, the Early Music Ensemble and Bacchanal Baroque, unfortunately underlined the marginal status of early music performance here. Only a few works of the program’s baker’s dozen had been polished to a facsimile of Baroque splendor.

Most of Sunday’s program remained on the level of an earnest rehearsal, with several notable exceptions.

“Nisi Dominus,” an unaccompanied motet for double chorus, demonstrated the high potential of putting these two contrasting musical groups together. The vocally agile singers of the five-member Early Music Ensemble animated the demanding lines of the solo chorus, while Bacchanal Baroque’s dozen choristers fleshed out the opposing chorus with a rich, cleanly focused sound. For that moment, the small La Jolla church resonated with the heady sounds that revolutionized sacred music almost four centuries ago.

Bacchanal Baroque’s motet “Cantate Domino” evoked similar excitement, and a pair of madrigals from “Lamenmto d’Arianna” sung with dramatic flair by the Early Music Ensemble were also clearly on target. A duet by bass Philip Larson and tenor John Peeling, “Interrote speranza,” indulged the vocal affectations of the period with stylish verve. A small cadre of instrumentalists assisted, including Thomas Stauffer’s enlightened playing as continuo cellist.

Daniel Ratelle, Bacchanal Baroque’s director, led those works that required a conductor’s stabilizing influence. His approach remained straightforward and his pulse steady, but his charges did not appear sufficiently confident to demonstrate the variety of period performance practices for which organizations such as the San Diego Early Music Society are founded.