‘Ode to St. Cecilia’: A Musical Meeting of Minds : Classical: Conductor Christopher Hogwood brings to Costa Mesa a historically informed performance of Handel’s work, as Mozart interpreted it 50 years later.

For conductor Christopher Hogwood, 1993 is “the year of looking at great works through other great people’s eyes.”

His Boston-based Handel & Haydn Society recently ventured Mendelssohn’s arrangement of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” And come Saturday, when the 178-year-old group arrives in Costa Mesa for an Orange County Philharmonic Society concert, one of its two namesakes will be represented, but it will be Mozart’s orchestration of Handel’s “Ode to St. Cecilia.”

“We’re not playing (the Ode) as Handel would have conceived it, but as Vienna would have heard it in the 1780s,” Hogwood said recently by phone from Boston. “It’s a meeting between Handel and Mozart, but Mozart has written it such that you can’t pretend to play Handel anymore.

“So we cut off our Handel feelings and play it (like) Mozart--Mozart instruments, Mozart pitch, Mozart style--a 1780s evening with apologies from the 1730s. One is keen to see what Mozart felt he could add without diminishing the original.”

The program also includes Mozart’s Fugue in G Minor for organ four-hands, Bach’s motet, “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied,” and C.P.E. Bach’s Symphony in B Flat.

For Mozart’s version of Handel’s ode, thank Baron Gottfried van Swieten.

Baron who?

*

“Baron Van Swieten was a court librarian and antiquarian who introduced his contemporaries Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven to earlier works of music, notably the counterpoint of Bach and Handel,” Hogwood said.

“Van Swieten also commissioned composers to write music for the private concerts of a group of aristocrats. Mozart played for them. What we’ve done is to design a program as it might have been heard at one of the baron’s concerts.”

According to Hogwood, 51, Mozart’s arrangement of the Handel Ode was a commission from the baron; Mozart wrote wind parts so it would be more in keeping with the tastes of the day. The Bach Motet will employ an edition featuring added wind parts, because that is how Mozart is believed to have first heard the work.

*

Such works provide an insight into how muddy the waters can get when it comes to notions of authentic performance practice.

As it happens, “Historically informed performance” is now edging out “authentic” or “period-performance practice” as the favored moniker for the musical school of thought that champions the use of instruments and forces

available to composers in their time. It’s commonly referred to by the acronym “HIP.”

In the case of Mendelssohn/Bach, HIP meant bowing with long instead of short phrases, extreme dynamics normally considered inappropriate for the “St. Matthew Passion,” and a grand piano continuo. “No way (is it) what Bach expected to hear,” Hogwood commented, “but that’s what you would have heard in Berlin, 1829.”

*

Given the intimate nature of the baron’s concerts, the venue in Orange County is decidedly un-HIP.

“The Performing Arts Center is bigger than the baron would ever have expected,” Hogwood pointed out. “That sort of thing is a constant worry to anybody in the HIP business.

“You do everything accurately in terms of instruments, then you play a hall 10 times bigger than would have been imaginable. If you don’t, you have 10 times the (financial) deficit. Either way you die.”

The Boston-based Handel & Haydn Society was founded in 1815. It gave the first U.S. performance of Handel’s “Messiah” three years later, and has performed the work annually since 1854.

While Hogwood treasures the group’s long history--the rarity, in American terms, of the correspondence between Beethoven and the Society, for instance--he pointed out that such longevity is not always a blessing.

“In musical terms, no, almost the reverse,” he said. “You have to work hard not to inherit performing traditions.”

Until recently, the choral arm of the society was 300 strong, which could easily mean lugubrious performances. Before Hogwood took over in 1986, it had been cut to 30; he changed the orchestra from modern to original instruments.

*

Hogwood is also music director of the Academy of Ancient Music, the London-based ensemble he founded in 1973, and principal guest conductor of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota. He also finds time to write and to collect paintings and says he recently developed a “mania” for early 19th-Century English porcelain that includes “the world’s largest collection of coffee cans.”

For Hogwood, the porcelain canisters are a metaphor for questions of individual artistic expression versus mass production--questions that can be surprisingly crucial when making decisions regarding the performance of early music.

“Artists individually decorated these porcelains, yet 8,000 different designs are mass-produced within 20 years, intended for the general public, not for connoisseurs,” Hogwood said. “The orchestra (can similarly be thought of as) the beginning of mass production, an organized factory for music.

“In a Bach cantata, the oboist can decorate his part. By the 19th Century, when you have 1,100 people on stage, he obeys the score. At what point does the second violin become a slave? How long do musicians maintain individual freedom as 19th-Century industrial thinking overcomes them?”

* Christopher Hogwood will conduct the Handel and Haydn Society in works of J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Handel and Mozart at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Concert preview at 7 p.m. $12 to $35. (714) 553-2422.