MUSIC REVIEW : MAK Plays Trivia From 18th Century

Musica Antiqua Koln--among the most celebrated and widely recorded of period performance groups, and MAK to its international circle of admirers--appeared in the Biltmore Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom on Tuesday, part of the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series.

Absent, however, was the German ensemble’s founder, guiding spirit and first violinist, Reinhard Goebel, who recently suffered a serious back injury.

The artists present, including Goebel’s adjutant, violinist Manfred Kraemer, coped skillfully, but one doesn’t necessarily cotton to the group’s brusquely efficient, sharply inflected and rhythmically free manner. On Tuesday, applied to a program of unrelievedly major-key 18th-Century trivia, it all sounded perilously close to parody of utterly up-to-the-minute performance style.

The composers on display were J.F. Fasch, J.C. Bach, J.C.F. Bach and tenuously attributed-to J.S. Bach. G.P. Telemann was also represented, but by a pair of dinky mechanical pieces seemingly designed to comfort his detractors.

Throughout the mercifully brief program--the ensemble wastes little time, according each work and each composer a few fast, glancing blows--one could nevertheless admire the facility of Kraemer and his colleagues, flutist Jed Wentz (a consistently appealing flow of liquid tone), violist Claudia Steeb, cellist Phoebe Carrai and harpsichordist Andreas Spering.

During a presentation that invited the mind to wander, the thought came--hardly for the first time--that traveling performers are under a misapprehension about our exposure to core 18th-Century repertory in period performance. We are in fact unjaded, Los Angeles having had minimal concert experience with such giants as J.S. Bach, Handel, Corelli, Vivaldi. We are, however, getting to know the dwarves quite well.