A Varied, Vivacious Vivaldi at Baroque Festival

The old claim that Vivaldi didn’t write 500 different concertos, just the same one 500 times, has been disproved again. This time, delightfully, at the opening event of the 21st annual Baroque Music Festival Corona del Mar, Sunday afternoon in St. Michael & All Angels Church in the beach community.

Burton Karson, who founded the weeklong celebration in 1981, led the 13-member festival orchestra with his customary, controlled brio, the players the familiar conglomerate of dedicated Baroque specialists brought together by affection for the music at hand.

This opening concert offered four disparate, quirky, perfectly irresistible Vivaldi concertos and an oddball finale from centuries later, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani (1941). One of the joys of Karson’s festival is that his programs abound in variety; he does not recycle his repertory. This agenda was thrilling, and probably unique.

Two orchestral concertos alternated with works with soloists. A melodious and jaunty Concerto in A was followed by the Concerto for Two Violins in A minor, with Rob Diggins and Jolianne von Einem the fleet-fingered, rich-toned and well-matched soloists achieving a performance that managed to be both vigorous and exquisite. Karson and orchestra assisted in high spirits.

A moody, whimsical and changeable Concerto in B flat less than five minutes in length became an intermezzo here, followed by a formidable virtuoso showpiece, the Concerto in D minor for two violins and cello. Here Diggins and Von Einem were joined by principal cellist Todd French, who held his own solidly.

A long line of first-rate organists have participated in the festival. The latest is the British musician Andrew Arthur, who took the soloist’s duties in the Poulenc work, along with timpanist Corey Ritter.

Arthur brought impressive authority and resourceful virtuosity to the part, though the work is not one--particularly in this context of pristine and endlessly inventive Vivaldi concertos--of great originality or depth. Indeed, it often seems, unlike so much of Poulenc’s otherwise masterly oeuvre, campy, Gothic and second-rate. Never mind. Here, it was tightly and sincerely performed.

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* The Baroque Music Festival continues at Sherman Library & Gardens, 2645 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar, Wednesday and Friday at 8 p.m. $30; Sunday, 4 p.m., St. Michael & All Angels Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive, Corona del Mar, $25. (949) 760-7887.