Dance & Music Reviews : Collegium Musicum at St. Augustine

One didn’t know quite what to expect when presented with the prospect of hearing a period-instrument ensemble called the Collegium Musicum Telemann from the Telemann Institute in Osaka, Japan.

What one got, Sunday afternoon at St. Augustine by-the-Sea Church in Santa Monica, was a first-class chamber group, well rehearsed and polished in execution, secure in style, playing a copious program remarkable for its musical high quality.

This was nowhere more true than in two works by Telemann, the composer who turned out music as fast as Oreo does cookies, only more variable in quality. But the Concerto for Recorder and Flauto Traverso and the Concerto for Recorder and Piccolo Violoncello (originally viola da gamba) proved inspired in content and engagingly performed.

These performances, and all, were marked by their easiness of gait and singing line, and a general avoidance of the cut-and-slash methods of many a period group. Indeed, once in a while, things could sound a bit too easy, as in moments of a consistently elegant reading of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto when certain harmonic and expressive implications seemed passed over too lightly.

Elsewhere, gentleness and cantilena produced vital results: in a nifty little, pre-Classical harpsichord concerto (in F) by Galuppi and solo harpsichord pieces by Duphly and Royer (the sinister “Marche des Scythes”), all pointedly yet pliantly played by Shinichiro Nakano; in the two encores, Bach’s famous Air and an exceptionally spirited run-through of the “Original Rag” by Joplin; and in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Sopranino Recorder in C.

In the latter, soloist Toru Kamiya had such difficulties with his recalcitrant instrument in the first movement that he looked miffed, and went on to prove in the next two movements of this acrobatic work that in fact that was not his normal state of affairs.