Musica Antiqua Koln Offers Seldom Heard Baroque Works

Reinhard Goebel and the Musica Antiqua Koln like to burrow into little-known corners of Baroque music, and they do it well, with fire and unanimity.

It would have been nice, though, if we had a more detailed road map than what UCLA Performing Arts and the capricious performers provided at Royce Hall on Sunday afternoon. The program contained no notes, no texts and no synopses, and Goebel’s brief, good-humored announcements before a few of the pieces were sometimes unintelligible, even from Row J.

The three fairly obscure cantatas that dominated the concert were most crucially affected; even linguists would have had trouble understanding the rapidly fluttering soprano of Dana Hanchard, because the balance greatly favored the ensemble.

The lopsided first half of the concert--roughly three times as long as the second half--opened with Telemann’s appropriately grand, celebratory Cantata for the Bicentennial of the Augsburg Religious Treaty, and then took an Italian turn toward Giuseppe Valentini’s rollicking, repetitive Concerto in A Minor, Opus 7, No. 11, and Handel’s urgently dramatic, even operatic cantata “Agrippina condotta a morire,” a last-minute switch from another Handel cantata. Vivaldi held the floor after intermission with a generally swift performance of his Concerto in F, Opus 3, No. 7, from “Estro Armonico” (unfortunately, the superb Concerto, Opus 3, No. 11, was scrapped due to the out-sized length of the program). With greater ease than in Telemann and Handel, Hanchard glided through the minefield of Vivaldi’s cantata “Vengo a vao lucia adorate,” in which the composer pulls off some effective writing over drones. A Telemann “Concert Polonois” was the encore.

The concert also had a human story that continues to unfold. Several years ago, when Goebel couldn’t continue playing the violin in the usual way due to pain in his third finger, he switched to playing left-handed. At the illuminating preconcert talk, Goebel said that the relearning process has been going on for more than eight years, and that he is not entirely back in form (audibly, he’s right). Regardless, his tenacious playing was quite inspiring.