MUSIC REVIEWS : Philharmonia Baroque Plays Mozart at LACMA

In a way it doesn’t matter what instruments Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque play: This is a fine orchestra, period, that just happens to be a period-instrument orchestra.

In its second visit this season to the County Museum of Art Wednesday, the San Francisco-based ensemble and its English music director delved into Mozart and drew a large and appreciative audience to Bing Theater.

The rapport exhibited between McGegan (who stayed away from the keyboard on this occasion) and his players is remarkable. Working without a baton and little concerned with beating time, McGegan chiseled detailed and intimately expressive phrases in the familiar 40th Symphony, all the while achieving ease and fluidity. Speedy tempos helped render the sometimes stately Andante delicate and sensitive, gave the Minuet bite and drive and revealed a strong virtuosic element in the Finale, executed with impressive finesse by the orchestra.

This was tight and polished music making, to be sure, but never merely so. These musicians are a crack team of poets.

Another poet, fortepianist Melvyn Tan, joined the orchestra for two concertos, No. 18 in B flat, K. 456, and No. 19 in F, K. 459. But Tan can be a fussy musician, a soloist who likes to push and pull at everything he gets his hands on. What’s more, he is not always the most impeccable of technicians, although he certainly flew through many virtuoso thickets.

Still, Tan proved a consistently interesting and volatile protagonist, always involved, impelling the music, caressing its curves, exploring soloistic byways and making the most of contrasts and accents on an instrument (a Stein replica) that sounded fairly puny in the surroundings.

McGegan and company supported with feathery lightness and perkiness. They opened the concert with Haydn’s brief and cheerful Overture to “Orlando Paladino,” in which the composer once again reveals his mastery of the comic silence.