Baroque Orchestra Animates Glorious Music of Its Period

The San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the connoisseur’s choice, perhaps, for this repertory, opened its second Southern California mini-series Monday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach with a delicious program of Vivaldi, Marcello and Rameau.

Conductor Nicholas McGegan animates and seems to understand the point of every phrase in the music. Watching him, one could reconstruct the starts, stops, contours and dynamics of the music. But none of it is mannered or even distracting. He simply knows how to make this music continuously vivid and expressive, and not many other people do.

Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with the irrepressible Vivaldi. Katherine Kyme was the soloist in the Violin Concerto in F, RV 568; Elizabeth Blumenstock was soloist in the Violin Concerto in D, RV 562, negotiating one of the longest and most challenging cadenzas ever penned.

Marc Schachman was the soloist in Marcello’s engaging but slight Oboe Concerto in D minor.

If Vivaldi threw open the doors of the drawing room, Rameau pulled them closed again. Or so it sounded in a 16-part suite drawn from his 1739 opera “Dardanus.”

The suite consists mostly of short, purely orchestral excerpts (the overture, various airs, dances and entrees), with grace and a certain good court taste of that day predominating. But the sameness of style and the limit in expressivity began to wear. One might have sided, after all, with the people who railed against Rameau’s style in those heady days of competing composers in 18th century Paris.