MUSIC REVIEW : Music by Chamber-Size Glendale Symphony

Given the enormous pool of instrumental talent in this region, there is irony in the fact that each of the most accomplished players/soloists seems to belong to more than three or four permanent musical bodies. For example: 13 of those instrumentalists, plus several featured players, formed the personnel list at the latest Glendale Symphony concert.

Keith Clark, music director of the Glendale ensemble, led this “Baroque Bonanza” genially at the comfortable Alex Theatre in Glendale Saturday night. The results, sometimes neat and orderly, sometimes ragged and under-rehearsed, pleasantly showed off these familiar players.

The best came last, in a brilliant but unfussy performance of Bach’s Second “Brandenburg” Concerto in which David Washburn was the unperturbedly virtuosic, highly musical trumpet soloist, handsomely seconded by violinist Isabel Lippi, flutist Sheridon Stokes and oboist Allan Vogel. Earlier, Lippi, with flutists Stokes and Salpy Kerkonian, achieved a lower-energy success in “Brandenburg” No. 4.

Soprano Julianne Baird took the spotlight in three of the program’s six sections, warming up slowly, but in good voice finally for the Alleluia movement of Vivaldi’s “In Furore Justisimae Irae.”

In Bach’s “Wedding” Cantata--wherein Vogel and bassoonist Kenneth Munday contributed strongly--and in two arias, Dido’s Lament (Purcell) and “Let the Bright Seraphim” (Handel), she proved dynamically limited and text-disconnected.

The bright, unfazed soloists in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Trumpets were Washburn and Timothy Divers.