Music Reviews : Koopman Brings Baroque to LACO

The most remarkable aspect of Wednesday’s concert by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in Ambassador Auditorium was the manner in which guest director-soloist Ton Koopman was able to turn, presumably with little rehearsal time at his disposal, this band into a convincing replica of a period-instrument ensemble.

The slimmed-down orchestra dispelled the notions that the same players cannot excel in both styles and that historically informed practice is impossible without the use of old instruments.

It took a while for the new (that is, old) sound to achieve focus on Wednesday. Directing from the harpsichord, Koopman raced through the Sinfonia from J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 174 as if he were leading his own Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, accustomed to blistering tempos, short bow strikes and terse phrasing. It was a scramble, particularly for the winds. In the ensuing Harpsichord Concerto in A of C.P.E. Bach, Koopman harmed his own cause with tempos so precipitate in the outer movements that his fingers seemed to spend as much time between the keys as on them.

In the other-worldly modulations of the slow movement, however, the orchestral strings produced a nearly vibratoless tone of a plangency one would have thought impossible to achieve on modern instruments. C.P.E.’s most radical style was exhibited in a Symphony in D, by whose finale the orchestra could field anything its high-spirited director threw its way.

The more conservative second half of the program was devoted to a sensuously Italianate Concerto grosso in B-flat for strings, long attributed to Pergolesi but recently proven to have been the work of Dutch composer Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692-1766), and J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 1 in C.