MUSIC REVIEWS : Fresh Look at 19th-Century Repertory

Monday’s offering by conductor Nicholas McGegan and his Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, first of a four-concert series this season in the L.A. County Museum’s Bing Theater, represented a considerable stretch for the San Francisco-based period band.

This was a program not of Philharmonia’s usual 19th-Century fare, played by 20 or so musicians, but works of the Romantic era, employing twice that number.

The most daring aspect of McGegan’s agenda on Monday was the presentation of music hyper-familiar from countless bloated, routine performances by huge modern orchestras: a suite from Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” score and the same composer’s “Italian” Symphony.

The aim of these enlightened antiquarians was clearly to refresh much-abused music, and they succeeded with alert, spirited readings displaying unanimity of purpose and ensemble.

Philharmonia Baroque delivered playing of warm sonority--the Bing’s tubby acoustic notwithstanding--and the meticulous balances required by Mendelssohn’s imaginative orchestration, particularly in the “Dream” overture, where the composer’s wishes were honored even to the employment of the ophicleide, the antique brass instrument, inaptly replaced by tuba in modern performances, that lends the work much of its magically mysterious coloring.

McGegan paced the “Italian” Symphony smartly, but with no sense of undue haste, the middle movements’ liquid flow subtly enhanced by expressive string slides and the exquisitely mellow solo flute of Stephen Schultz.

Mendelssohn’s scores were separated by the Symphony in D minor of Spanish-born Juan Crisostomo Arriaga, written in 1826, the year of the putative prodigy’s death at age 19.

Arriaga’s few works have received a good deal of attention in recent decades, objects of a minor cult that thrives on music that sounds like some better-known composer’s--in this instance, sort of like early Beethoven, very much like early Schubert.

To certain listeners’ ears the symphony is blatantly derivative; to others,’ remarkably prophetic. Chronology is on the side of the naysayers.