A Full-Bodied Approach to Vivaldi

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra opened its second Orange County mini-season Monday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church with a delicious program of Vivaldi, Marcello and Rameau.

Much of the considerable pleasure in the San Francisco-based group’s music-making begins with conductor Nicholas McGegan, who animates and seems to understand the point of every phrase in the music. Indeed, you could watch from inside a soundproof booth and still reconstruct the starts, stops, contours and dynamics of the music simply from McGegan’s physicality, expressed not only in his hands and arms, but in shoulder shrugs, knee bends and lean-backs.

But none of this is distracting. It’s just that he and his band know how to make this music continually vivid and expressive, and not many others do. That makes his ensemble, perhaps, the connoisseur’s choice for this repertory, and McGegan the best argument that music of this period benefits from a conductor, even though it can be (and originally was) done without one.

Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with Vivaldi. Surely one of Stravinsky’s most stupid remarks was that Vivaldi wrote one concerto 1,000 times. Quite the contrary. With Vivaldi, the spirit animating the Renaissance took its first flight in music. Hearing him, we acknowledge the beginning of infinite possibilities and a precious moment when nature and society still connected at a vital point.

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The program included two demanding Vivaldi violin concertos. Katherine Kyme was the soloist in Concerto in F, RV 568, which begins with rising wave patterns that billow and surge across the orchestra, lifting one’s spirits at the same time. Some darkness and turbulence follow, but essentially nature remains benign and the piece ends in bouncy optimism.

Elizabeth Blumenstock was the amazing soloist in Vivaldi’s Concerto in D, RV 562. She had to negotiate possibly one of the longest and most challenging cadenzas ever writtenor so it seemed--and do it nearly at the end of the piece. Surely Bach, who acknowledged Vivaldi as an inspiration, found precedent here for his own extraordinarily lengthy keyboard excursion in the Fifth “Brandenburg” Concerto.

But there is far more to this work than pyrotechnics. The violinist straddles the martial and regal domain announced by the natural horns and gruff string unisons, and the lyric, personal world expressed through the softer winds, partaking of both characteristics.

Whether expressed outwardly--as with the poems that go with the “The Four Seasons” or in such titles as “La Caccia”--or not, Vivaldi is never really very far away from programmatic music. He always evokes moods, pictures and dramas through endless invention and energy.

In both concertos, horn players R. J. Kelley and Paul Avril contributed mightily. Of course, they have the added advantage of playing such beautiful-looking instruments, in which metal coils around itself in looping circles unbroken by valves. Actually, it’s amazing anyone can play those things at all, much less in tune and with such precision and spirit.

The same qualities apply to the whole orchestra, a period-instrument band that uses original or replicas of 18th century instruments. The pedigrees of each are detailed in the program booklet.

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Marc Schachman, for instance, used a wooden instrument modeled on an 18th century English oboe when he played Marcello’s Concerto in D minor. The resulting sound, much like a recorder, was gentle and beguiling--yet it flourished in the wonderfully airy and warm acoustic of the church. Still, engaging as it is, Marcello’s work is at a lower order of creativity than his Venetian master’s.

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.”

Consisting mostly of short, purely orchestral excerpts (the overture, various airs, dances and entrees), the suite leaves out any vocal parts, so it’s impossible to do a fair assessment of the opera.

Certainly, grace and a certain good court taste of that day predominated in what we heard. Much of the music did exactly what the titles suggested (“Air gracieux pour les plaisirs” or “Air Tendre: Calme de sens”), but only that and nothing more.

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.

The orchestra returns to St. Andrew’s on Nov. 11 and Feb. 17.