MUSIC REVIEW : Vivaldi Takes Flight in Baroque Solos

The spirit of Renaissance humanism takes full flight in the music of Vivaldi and it is this, as much as his fecund imagination and manifold beauties, that keeps the immense output of the composer’s music vital and current.

At least it was so when Gregory Maldonado and Jolianne von Einem took the solo parts in the Concerto for Two Violins, RV 518, with the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra in a largely unhackneyed Vivaldi program Saturday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

The composer wrote more than 400 concertos, about 230 of which are for violin solo, so the current concert and recording fixation on “The Four Seasons,” wonderful as they are, constitutes an obsession almost worthy of a study by Freud.

Fortunately, Maldonado’s stylish period instrument group played a wonderful variety of concertos for bassoon (the composer’s second most-favored instrument), recorder and bassoon, two flutes, string orchestra and, yes, “Spring” and “Summer” from you-know-what.

The soloists--Charles Fernandez, bassoon; Kim Pineda, recorder and flute; Janet Beazley, flute, and Maldonado and Von Einem, violins--played with character and felicity, despite occasional sour notes, amplification that overemphasized harpsichordist Edward Murray and a determinedly intrusive bird that somehow managed not to break the musicians’ concentration. An ancillary pleasure lay in watching the rapt, responsive faces of the players, both to each other and to the wonders of the composer.

Annette Quinones Simons wrote the literate and informative program notes.