Les Violons du Roy Deliver With Punch

Larger ensembles have rehearsed in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, but Saturday’s concert by Les Violons du Roy was the first public performance there by a chamber orchestra. The 18-member Canadian band brought full-bodied works by Bach and Handel, and the room sustained the spirited readings well.

Now widely touted, Les Violons du Roy was founded by conductor Bernard Labadie in Quebec in 1984. Labadie is still at the helm, though few of the musicians he had with him Saturday in Costa Mesa looked old enough to be among the original ensemble. Well-drilled but still full of relish for the music, they played with a highly appealing sort of disciplined eagerness.

Though basically a modern-instrument band, the strings all use period bows--with stylistic assurance. They draw a big but fairly straight sound, stingy with vibrato and responsive to nuances of articulation.

Their conductor has the expansive gestures of a symphonic podium hero but the ears of a chamber musician, and he is sensitive to both historical niceties and emotional connections. Labadie seems never to have met a phrase that could do without dynamic swelling and tapering, but in context the roller-coaster results proved lively and, for the most part, convincingly motivated.

That is partly because he works hard at characterization. From the jazzy dotted swing of the Rondeau from Bach’s B-minor Orchestral Suite No. 2 to the fiery, folk-flavored fiddling of the penultimate Allegro from Handel’s D-minor Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 10, Labadie filled Bach’s dances with a plausible sense of step and weight and kept Handel’s fancies firmly pointed.

The featured soloist was guest flutist Andre Papillon, in the B-minor Suite and the Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata No. 209. Elegant and undemonstrative, Papillon floated a suave, pure tone that was most effective when given room to work, as in the florid Polonaise Double, and he romped blithely in the Badinerie.

But the ensemble also produced its own fine soloists. Violinists Nicole Trotier and Julie Triquet had numerous moments of antiphonal glory in the Handel Concerto Grosso and its D-major partner, No. 5 from the Opus 6 set. They played with a fleet, focused grace that was expressive at any speed.

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Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 brings the double-reeds to the fore. Diane Lacelle and Jennifer Weeks were the eloquent and agile oboists, joined by a local stalwart, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s amazingly fluent and mellow bassoonist Kenneth Munday.

The Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata No. 21, its solo crooned by Lacelle with haunted intensity, completed the printed agenda. In encore, Labadie offered a rollicking dash through Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” sparked by the oboe pair, and the famous Air from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, sensitively embellished on the repeats by Trotier.