Music Review : N.Y.’s Philharmonia Virtuosi Brings Exotic Fare to Biltmore

One of the season’s more adventurous Baroque programs was delivered Thursday evening at the Biltmore Hotel. Not by a European period-instrument band, as we might expect from the present auspices--the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in in Historic Sites series--but by a decidedly retro, modern-instrument outfit: the New York-based Philharmonia Virtuosi.

Much of the audience seemed pleased with the playing, and perhaps even more with the jovial garrulousness of Richard Kapp, the orchestra’s conductor and the evening’s master of ceremonies.

Such rarely heard works, on rarely heard solo instruments, as J.S. Bach’s Concerto in A for oboe d’amore (more familiar as a harpsichord concerto in the same key) and a Vivaldi Concerto in D minor for viola d’amore, lent exotic appeal to the event.

The Bach concerto also introduced a soloist of persuasive skill and stylishness, oboist Peggy Pearson, although her sterling effort was hardly complemented by the orchestra’s glutinous string textures.

Hearing the many-stringed viola d’amore in the hands of as commanding a practitioner as Mela Tenenbaum, the orchestra’s concertmaster, had its appeal, too. But the inherently soft, mournful quality of the instrument’s tone is severely compromised, as it was on this occasion, by stringing it with bright-toned metal rather than gut.

Elsewhere, Tenenbaum--this time as violinist--proved an able soloist in the Concerto in G minor from Locatelli’s “L’arte del violino,” savoring the loopy convolutions of the cadenza-like capriccii with virtuosic glee, but elsewhere playing with the same momentum-inhibiting vibrato that afflicted the tutti .

Kapp proved a heavy-handed conductor throughout the program, which also included Purcell’s “Fantasy on One Note” and, to start and finish the proceedings, scrappy readings of non-Baroque chestnuts: Mozart’s Divertimento in D, K. 136, and Bartok’s Romanian Dances.