Baroque Festival Adds the Unexpected to the Traditional

The 18th annual edition of the estimable Baroque Music Festival Corona del Mar opened Sunday at St. Michael and All Angels Church with an attractive concerto program. Founder-conductor Burton Karson rounded up the usual suspects, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi . . . and Robert Linn?

Linn, long a stalwart of the USC music department, wrote a four-movement Concerto Grosso for the 1993 festival, which Karson revived in tribute to the late Donald Leake, the oboist and surgeon who had commissioned the piece. Stylistically sly and metrically frisky, it provided engaging work for oboist Gonzalo Ruiz and harpsichordist Katherine Shao, and the afternoon’s best opportunity for the small chamber orchestra to really make a sonic statement.

The rest of the program belonged to an accomplished and well-traveled quartet of period instrument principals. Elizabeth Blumenstock applied charismatic energy and vehement body language to Bach’s A-minor Violin Concerto, digging for tonal projection at all costs. Making a mockery of any instrumental typecasting was bassoonist Michael O’Donovan, preeminently lyrical and suave in Vivaldi’s B-flat Concerto, “La Notte.”

Canadian organist Thomas Annand proved expressively blithe and accurate in the virtuoso tootling of Handel’s B-flat Organ Concerto, a work quoted by Linn. Ruiz had uncharacteristic trouble getting the upper octave of his instrument to speak in Marcello’s D-minor Oboe Concerto, but otherwise delivered mellow sound and pointed phrasing.

Karson and the Festival Orchestra accompanied fluently, balanced in sound and spirit if not always completely integrated rhythmically.

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Baroque Music Festival continues Wednesday, Friday and Sunday at various Corona del Mar locations. $25-$30. (949) 760-7887.