MUSIC REVIEWS : L.A. Baroque Fulfilling Promise

With its profoundly satisfying holiday concert, presented on Saturday in the pleasingly resonant atrium lobby of the post-modern Water Garden complex in Santa Monica, L.A. Baroque approached the decade mark of its history sounding very much like the superior period band violinist-director Gregory Maldonado has, with deeds rather than puffery, been promising us.

In a program both well executed and imaginatively constructed, an interested observer could feel more than ever that L.A. Baroque is on the right track, possibly even the fast track.

Not that speed--an excess of which has been a besetting sin of historically informed performance--played a prominent part. Order was maintained, but never at the expense of the visceral charge, in the group’s offerings.

These included a solemn “Sonata a quattro” by Corelli, Telemann’s potent Concerto in E minor for alto recorder (the superbly accomplished Kim Pineda) and transverse flute (the agile Janet Beazley) and the Concerto in B-flat, Opus 4, No. 2, of Handel, familiar on the organ but argued here with lively conviction and decorative imagination for his instrument by one of L.A. Baroque’s resident treasures, harpsichordist Edward Murray.

A nativity cantata by Alessandro Scarlatti proved too blandly benign to make an impression on its own, but its protagonist, Kris Gould, with her pure, faultlessly tuned soprano, scored a personal triumph and proceeded to reinforce it in the evening’s centerpiece, the beguilingly disingenuous “Pastorale on the Birth of Jesus Christ” by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, L.A. Baroque’s holiday signature piece.

Maldonado, putting aside his violin, conducted with a fitting blend of reverence and fervor while his forces, a spot of bother in the finale aside--a sudden acceleration threatened to derail the ensemble--delivered not only with their customary enthusiasm but with a crowning polish that must have cheered veteran L.A. Baroque watchers.