Venue Major Player in Baroque Concert

At a very basic level, an orchestral concert is the interaction of a group of instruments within a space. That may seem self-evident, but for Saturday’s concert of the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, the Water Garden in Santa Monica was as much a player as any of the musicians gathered in one of its marble-and-glass lobbies.

Among the positive contributions of this business complex atrium were spaciousness, elegance and a booming acoustic. On the downside were lack of sight lines, a persistent power hum and that booming acoustic, which promoted some instruments and squelched others.

Beneficiaries included the full ensemble, which played two early Haydn symphonies, Nos. 1 and 30, with great rhythmic verve and stylistic panache under conductor Edward Murray, Music Director Gregory Maldonado being on sabbatical. Most lavishly flattered by the acoustic was flutist Saul Waskow, whose mini-concerto in the slow movement of No. 30 filled the room with pristine glories.

The official soloist, however, was pianist Tom Beghin. Leading Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 12 in A and 14 in E-flat from the back of the arc of musicians, Beghin and his period fortepiano sounded as if they were in another county, tiny and remote on the aural map.

What could be heard suggested that Beghin, a UCLA faculty member, is a musician of intelligently deployed imagination, an impressively articulate keyboard technician. Except in the minor-mode episodes of the Andantino, Beghin seemed to eschew the conventional Mozartean idea that the E-flat Concerto is necessarily intimate in spirit, treating it with a rambunctious zest to match his characterful traversal of No. 12.

Perhaps it was because of the effort of holding back to accommodate Beghin’s slender sonic presence, but the period-instrument band found agreement on pitch even harder to come by in the concertos than in the symphonies.