Northern Flair

Ready for something old?

So is Bernard Labadie, founder of the Quebec City-based Les Violons du Roy, which makes its Orange County debut playing music by Bach and Handel tonight in Costa Mesa.

“Louis XIII had a group called ‘The King’s Fourteen Fiddles,’ ” or Les Quatorze Violons du Roy, Labadie said during a recent phone interview from Kingston, Ontario, where the 15-member chamber music group was on tour.

“We dropped the [number] but kept the name because we wanted to reflect the French heritage of Quebec City, and we also wanted to reflect some of our main interest,” he said. “We do a lot of baroque music. The only problem is that English-speaking people have a hard time pronouncing it.”

Can you say “Vee-oh-LAW duh rwah”?

Labadie was 21 when he formed the group in 1984 with some friends at the Music Conservatory of Quebec.

“We were all very young,” he said. “We didn’t know what was in store. Starting from being students and bringing it up to world-class was a long run.

“Financially, we’re doing well now, but there were years of turmoil, especially between 1993-95, when we thought we might have to disband,” he said. “Things have changed over the last 2 1/2 years because of touring and our recording contract with Dorian Records.”

Their five Dorian recordings have won enthusiastic reviews, as did their 1997 New York debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival.

What distinguishes the sound of the group?

“Basically we developed a style of playing modern instruments with baroque bows,” Labadie said. “Seventy-five percent of what we call the baroque sound--articulation, phrasing--comes from the bow, not from the instrument.

“It was pretty fascinating discovering how far you can go in playing in a historically informed way with a period bow,” he said. “But we need especially flexible people because we [also] do other, more modern repertory.”

They also work when possible from original sources “and not through the filters and the several layers of varnish that were made by the generations that followed.

“That doesn’t mean that all the traditions we inherit should be discarded,” Labadie said. “It means a modern performance should be able to distinguish between those traditions, those additions made over time, from the original sources that are accessible to us.

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“I’m talking about manuscripts, treatises, iconography--all the incredible means that modern musicology have developed in the last 30 years, which are now easily accessible to everyone.”

But there is an even better source--the instruments themselves.

Take the issue of tempo.

“What you learn from the instrument is that stepped-up tempo comes very naturally,” Labadie said. “A baroque bow is in essence designed for that. . . . If you play Bach concertos in what were traditionally slow tempos with baroque bows, it just doesn’t work. The bow doesn’t sustain the sound. So we learn a lot from the instrument.”

On the other hand, he’s against speed for its own sake.

“Speeding up everything became a trademark [of the period-performance movement] used wrongfully,” he said. “Tempo has to come from the music itself and not from the idea that it’s fashionable to do it quickly. I like very quick tempos myself. You’ll hear that. But I never take them as something that should be done as a fashion.”

In fact, Labadie says, his goal is not to re-create the music as it might have sounded in the time it was written.

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“Reconstruction of a performance of that day is not interesting to me,” he said. “The essence of the movement is not to reconstruct the way it was done in the 18th century. The essence is to be able to digest the work and make up one’s mind about it directly, with direct access to the sources, not what people [through history] thought about it. . . .

“It doesn’t remove the interpreter from an inner responsibility to the music itself, to make it alive and talk directly to the modern audience,” he said. “The goal is to make this music speak to people. . . .

“If you listen to historically informed performances recorded 25 years ago, you’ll hear that people thought there was only one style of playing it,” he said. “Now you have five different universes. Somehow that’s quite healthy. . . . “

History, he said, is just that.

“The essence of how they played this music in the 18th century is lost because we’ll never hear it,” he added. “If you listen to an early 20th century recording of a Beethoven trio, you’ll hear already the styles have changed so much from then to now. Nobody plays a Beethoven trio with so much portamento [sliding from one note to another].

“The only thing you can extrapolate is, if styles have changed so much in 50 or 60 years, somehow it’s silly to think you can reconstruct performances of the 18th century,” Labadie said. “Style is not in the bow or in the instrument. It’s in the musician’s head.”

* Les Violons du Roy will play works by Bach and Handel on tonight in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $30. (714) 556-2787.