Old-Fashioned and Proud of It : Gregory Maldonado, founder of the 10-year-old L.A. Baroque Orchestra, wants you to know how the music was played when first written.

Gregory Maldonado found his first violin in a pawnshop when he was 12, and he hasn’t stopped playing since. He had gotten the bug when he heard a couple of schoolmates play a violin duet during a seventh-grade music education class in his Central Valley hometown of Merced.

“That summer, before eighth grade,” remembers the bearded musician, sitting in his Silver Lake living room, “my mother and I were walking downtown and we passed a pawnshop. There was a violin hanging in the window and a light went on in my head. ‘Gee Mom,’ I said, ‘if you bought me that violin, I’d make you very proud of me.’ She called my bluff and went in and bought it. Twenty-five dollars. We went across the street to the local music store and bought a how-to book and away I went. In a couple of hours, I was playing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ”

Maldonado, 38, a second-generation Mexican American, didn’t come from a musical family. His father was a mail carrier, his mother a lab technician for a food processing company. Yet he would eventually form the first (to his knowledge) period-instrument orchestra in Los Angeles. Now his creation, the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, is celebrating its 10th anniversary season with a gala concert Saturday at the Water Garden in Santa Monica. (The program will be repeated the following day at Occidental College).

The performances will reunite Maldonado with his mentor, the noted British baroque violinist Monica Huggett, who, in a 1982 master class in Vancouver and in England later, set him on his path. The two will be joined by another former Huggett pupil, LABO member Jolianne von Einem, for three Bach violin concertos: the D minor (BWV 1052), the double concerto in D minor (BWV 1043) and the triple concerto in D major (BWV 1064). Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, Nos. 1-3 complete the bill.

The music of the Baroque period and its star composers--Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann and Handel--has gone in and out of fashion since it was first heard in 17th and 18th century Europe. But it’s likely never been more ubiquitous than it is now. “Early music” sells CDs and tickets, it’s the background music for the good life in luxury car commercials, and it conjures the dishy details of history in such films as “The Madness of King George” and “Restoration.”

For musicians like Maldonado and Huggett, though, the way you play the music is almost as important as the music itself. Authenticity has been Maldonado’s obsession ever since he packed away his modern steel-stringed violin in 1981 while studying for a performance degree at UCLA. The gut-stringed Baroque instrument he plays is smaller in size and sweeter and more reverberant in sound than the instruments the members of the L.A. Philharmonic hold under their chins.

“When I first started playing a gut-string violin, I went, ‘Wow what a beautiful sound.’ It’s so different, so sensuous, not as mean and powerful and big as a modern violin. The possibilities of color are so different. I began to play, and I felt like I’d come home.”

Huggett honed Maldonado’s old-fashioned skills. Her playing was inspirational--”Just watching her tune could make you cry”--and so was her attitude. She helped him to lose the rigidity and tension that marks modern violin technique. As it turned out, Maldonado found the looser Baroque mode more suited to his laid-back personality.

“It was just the idea of serving the music and making it come to life,” he says. “Even though we play on old instruments or copies of old instruments, the idea is to try to play the music like they played it [when it was first written]. Also, to make it interesting for the audience of today, so that their attention is focused and they want to know more about it. It’s a very intimate thing.”

It’s also a fun thing. “Baroque music is about dance music,” Huggett says. “You need to feel a dancing rhythm in every molecule.”

Inspired by European period ensembles, Maldonado founded the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra in 1985, in part as a tribute to his parents, both of whom had died around that time. Uniting around core members such as Von Einem, harpsichordist Edward Murray and oboist Michael DuPree, the ensemble at first played mostly small-scale chamber music concerts.

Now as then, the size of the orchestra expands and contracts as needed, drawing musicians from the increasing number of early-music specialists in L.A. It has become a summer regular at the Getty Center--where it revived Rameau’s rarely performed 18th century opera “Anacreon” in 1994--and at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater. It has staged Mozart and Monteverdi operas with Long Beach Opera and performed at the Music Center. As music reviewer Herbert Glass put it in The Times, “The ensemble has proven its point over the years. . . . These people are capable of doing their thing exceedingly well.”

Not that the last decade has been easy. Robert Winter, the UCLA music professor and creator of a series of acclaimed classical music CD-ROMs, has watched the LABO over the years, and he compares Maldonado’s progress to a young Haydn’s. “He was never a prodigy, just a slow climber, relentless.

“I remember a time when he had to ask me to lend him 25 bucks to help pay the rent,” Winter, whose wife, Julia, now sits on the LABO board, continues. “The early orchestras in Vienna all were founded by one incredibly stubborn person. Any art endeavor needs that vision. But God has to send an angel every so often; in Greg’s case, it was Annette.”

If Huggett helped focus Maldonado musically, Annette Simons, 42, kept his orchestra alive financially. A native Angeleno, she’d worked for 11 years as a paralegal at a downtown firm before following her bliss and completing a master of fine arts program in arts administration at Brooklyn College in New York. She met Maldonado after an L.A. Baroque concert in September 1991 and found her niche.

At first, she was a volunteer, brought onto the board after a brief 1991 tour of Europe the orchestra really couldn’t afford. When it seemed as if much of the following season might have to be canceled, she took charge.

“We had been developing a good reputation,” she says, “and wanted to preserve it.” Instead of canceling, performances were reconfigured. Big string programs were converted into smaller ensemble or chamber concerts, and a summer series at a Santa Monica church was inaugurated.

Simons, who officially became managing director in 1993, went after grant money for the orchestra--including the E. Nakamichi Foundation, which is a lead sponsor of the 1995-96 season. With a new series of orchestral concerts and more casual chamber music affairs held in art galleries and private homes, LABO will have presented 21 concerts by this season’s end, on a budget of $150,000, 40% from donations, the rest from ticket sales.

“We’re not just a tiny group in churches anymore,” Simons points out. “But the challenge remains to broaden the audience.”

For now at least, the LABO is that rare labor of love that actually breaks even. Still, both Simons and Maldonado work other jobs. He teaches Baroque violin at USC and plays for other ensembles; she handles rights and clearances for the new media producer Calliope Media and is a fund-raising consultant to the Music Center.

Maldonado takes the long view of his career: The seed that was planted in seventh grade is still inching its way upward.

“I guess I’m a slow bloomer,” he says softly. “I know where I’ve been, and I know where I’m going. And I want it badly enough to make it happen. The whole thing of playing the instrument, that’s blossoming too, as I understand how to play the damn thing. To me, it’s a real privilege growing older and learning. Even if it’s not until I’m 50 that I feel like I’m a virtuoso on my instrument or until I’m 60 or before I die, I’ll still feel like I’ve accomplished something.”

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L.A. BAROQUE ORCHESTRA, Saturday: Water Garden, 1620 26th St., Santa Monica; 8 p.m.; $24. Next Sunday: Thorne Hall, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Eagle Rock; 4 p.m.; $20, $18 for senior citizens and students. Phone: (213) 466-1767.