MUSIC REVIEW : Baroque Festival Ends on a Magnificat Note

Concluding the final concert of the 12th annual Baroque Music Festival of Corona del Mar on Sunday afternoon, Burton Karson unveiled the sort of discovery of which most music directors only dream: the first American performance of a work by a “name” composer. In this case, the work, a Magnificat by Alessandro Scarlatti (father of composer Domenico Scarlatti), was so good and so short that the enterprising, and spontaneous, Karson played it twice.

In fact, the 10-minute work, which Scarlatti wrote for and conducted at the Roman celebration of St. Cecilia’s Day in 1720, remains unpublished and was made available to Karson by Denis Stevens, the British musicologist who lives in Santa Barbara.

Like Vivaldi’s “Beatus vir,” RV 597, which opened the imaginatively conceived program, Scarlatti’s Magnificat serves up a musical feast of florid energy, extreme but smoothly seamless contrasts of dynamics and timbre, sensuously intricate string writing, and stirring ceremonial passages for trumpets and drums.

Unlike the Vivaldi, however, Scarlatti’s exciting music is peppered with surprisingly abrupt choral outbursts of the type Bach put into his great Passions. The work concludes with a beguilingly gentle “Amen.”

The performance gave a good, remarkably satisfying idea of the music’s strength and beauties even if the instrumentalists sounded under-rehearsed. The fresh-voiced Festival Singers proved more sincere than expert and the acoustically drab St. Michael and All Angels Church suffered from boomy bass.

Fortunately, soloists Amy Kane Jarman, Carter Scott, Gregory Wait and, particularly, soprano Laura Fries and baritone Peter Lindskoog contributed some thrilling moments, with the seductively soft-voiced Fries showing how to trill at the end of cadences in authentic Baroque style.

The afternoon’s second half offered solid performances of a cappella motets by Giovanni Gabrieli and Juan Gutierrez de Padilla--the latter a transplanted Spaniard who served as a New World maestro de capilla from 1629 until his death in 1664--and an occasionally elegant account of Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6, No. 5.