A Broker of Baroque : Music: Christopher Hogwood, who will lead the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in O.C., is a leader of the period instrument movement.

A generation of music-lovers has been listening to Handel and other Baroque composers in a different way because of people like Christopher Hogwood.

Hogwood, who will conduct the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra on Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in a program being offered by the Orange County Philharmonic Society, is a leading guru of the period instrument movement: Music is played on the instruments (or replicas) of the composer’s time. The movement also calls for a specific style of playing--short, crisp phrases and fast tempos, at least as far as Baroque music is concerned.

Hogwood has been a great popularizer of the approach, which is now beginning to take in the Romantic era as well. His recordings of the Bach “Brandenburg” Concertos, Pachelbel’s Canon, Handel’s “Water Music” Suites and “Messiah,” and Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” have become best-sellers, and he has become a globe-trotting conductor.

But he has his detractors. Some critics, referring to that clipped tempo, consider his music “sewing-Machine Bach.” Hogwood’s “work tends to be most convincing in inverse proportion to the familiarity and indeed the ‘greatness’ of the music,” according to Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer. (In addition to having directed the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra since 1987, Hogwood has been music director of the Boston-based 177-year-old Haydn and Handel Society since 1986.)

Dyer goes on: “Listeners familiar with . . . interpretations by searching, experienced and technically accomplished, if less ‘stylish,’ conductors are unlikely to be satisfied with Hogwood’s approach.”

“Those are Richard’s opinions,” Hogwood said during a recent phone interview from Rapid City, S.D., where he was conducting the Minnesotans as part of their current tour. “What for some critics is a well-interpreted performance for another critic will be an over-interpreted performance, and for a third, under-interpreted.

“It depends on personal taste. It’s like criticizing a restaurant for its seasonings. There’s plenty of room for all these interpretations.”

Besides, he added, “all these interpretive attitudes that are struck nowadays are open to question and reassessment. Every student who comes along can come up with a piece of information that radically changes what his teachers were doing 10 years earlier. It happens in my own performances.

“One month, I found out that classical minuets were taken quite a bit faster than I ever was taking them. It doesn’t seem to be wrong to put that idea into practice and come up with a different interpretation than the one I had done earlier.

“Every month something new comes along to give one more information or consider an idea or undermine an idea. In that respect, (the movement) prevents doctrinaire teaching that has occurred in conservatoires, where people’s interpretations are passed on through thick and thin to pupils and pupils of pupils.”

Hogwood was born in Nottingham, England, in 1941, and trained as a harpischordist and helped found the Early Music Consort in 1967. Then, in 1973, he founded the Academy of Ancient Music with the purpose of giving historically authentic performances of Baroque music, conducted from the keyboard.

“I was quite a late starter,” he said. “I was quite a bit self-taught in attitude to interpretations.” However, he named British musicologist Thurston Dart as a major influence. Dart trained him, he said, “to ask the right question before one sailed out, to ask the question of the music, to not try and force a heavily subjective view onto the music until I had looked for its own message and what the recipe itself specified.”

Still, some critics consider Hogwood singularly unexpressive in the messages he finds in music.

“If you’re brought up to enjoy very slow movements in the Bruno Walter tradition applied to Baroque and classical works, certainly a faster tempo will rule out some of the effects that you have grown very fond of,” Hogwood acknowledged.

“But,” he quickly added, “that’s pure sentimental attachment. Must we all behave like Bruno Walter? I admire him very much, but I can’t concede his interpretive style has a strong historical basis.”

Hogwood also disagrees with critics who believe that playing older instruments designed to be heard in halls seating 200 or 300 people is a big problem in the large concert halls of today. “Original instruments were not feeble,” Hogwood declared. “There is this illusion that they somehow were little waifs and strays. They were lusty instruments. Of course, it’s hard work for a chamber group to play in a big hall, but I don’t think the point is so valid for an orchestra. You put 20 instruments on stage, and they make a certain sound.”

For his Costa Mesa program, Hogwood has chosen works by 20th-Century composers Gustav Holst and Michael Tippett as well as by Corelli and Haydn.

“St. Paul is a modern orchestra, so it should play contemporary music,” he said. “The validity of the modern orchestra is that it can play a program of mixed periods of music. That’s at least one of the reasons I enjoy working and programming modern instruments. Then, if you play a program coming from various periods, it almost makes more sense of historical awareness.”

Christopher Hogwood will conduct the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in works by Corelli, Haydn, Holst and Michael Tippett Monday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The Orange County Philharmonic Society is the program sponsor. Tickets: $11 to $28. Information: (714) 646-6277.