Verbruggen: Serious, but With Flair

In the super-specialized world of the Baroque recorder, the Netherlands’ Marion Verbruggen is one of the stars, and at Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theatre Wednesday night, it was easy to see and hear why. A tall, cheerful-looking woman, she carries herself with a certain charisma, shaking her head in time to the harpsichord introductions, occasionally raising her right leg in the air, mid-solo. She can squeeze more shadings out of the humble alto and soprano recorders than one has a right to expect, punching out the notes with power and an often flip sense of articulation and phrasing.

For all of Verbruggen’s flair--which tended to place her more reticent colleagues, harpsichordist Robert van Asperen and cellist Elisabeth Le Guin, more in the background--the program was a serious attempt to show how the Baroque styles of Rome fanned out into Germany and London to reach their apotheoses in J.S. Bach and Handel.

From Rome, Alessandro Stradella’s Sinfonia No. 22 found the Verbruggen Ensemble handling the interior dialogue in an engaging call-and-response manner, and Corelli’s Sonata in G minor, Opus 5, No. 7, rumbled along at a quick, pointedly articulated pace. In a pair of sonatas in C from London by Barsanti and Handel (Opus 1, No. 7), the former’s workmanlike writing was easily outshone by the latter’s catchy tunes, handled with more than a touch of whimsy by Verbruggen. As for the Germans, Telemann’s somewhat foursquare Concerto No. 5 was nevertheless played with gusto and spirit, and Verbruggen found considerable depth and a flowing sense of line in Bach’s Sonata in G minor, BWV 1034.

As a solo interlude, Van Asperen delivered a rambling, rubato-laden performance of Bernardo Storace’s Passacaglia No. 10, which in one passage has a descending harmonic pattern that evokes Spanish music. A rollicking Allegro from Handel’s Sonata in A minor, Opus 1, No. 4 wrapped things up.