Red Priest Plays Spirited and Fantastical Baroque

Even the most staid British music periodicals have been giddy over the 3-year-old period instrument band Red Priest. Saturday the quartet of early-music veterans gave us some indication of what all the clamor is about with a high-energy Baroque hoedown at the El Camino College Center for the Arts.

The ensemble’s name comes from the nickname given to Vivaldi by his contemporaries. Its performing style, however, comes from pop-infused acts such as Kronos Quartet and the violinist Kennedy.

For those with longer pop memories, flutist Ian Anderson of the band Jethro Tull is probably a more relevant model for the manic presence of recorder virtuoso Piers Adam.

He introduced almost everything, strutted and danced while delivering musical fusillades, and generally dominated the proceedings with flamboyant zest.

Violinist Julia Bishop and cellist Angela East had important solo opportunities-principally from Biber and Bach, respectively-to demonstrate their own skills. Harpsichordist Howard Beach accompanied bravely throughout, and all played primarily from memory, allowing a sense of unfettered interaction and spontaneity.

That was good, since their wide-ranging, unhackneyed program stressed the more fantastical side of the Baroque imagination. They offered a set of English theater music, early Italian trio sonatas, French opera excerpts, two Spanish dances, freely rearranged larger works by Vivaldi and Bach, and closed with a deliciously twisted version of Corelli’s variations on “La Folia.”

All of this was vividly interpreted, spiked with quotations and style references, and played with dash and precision. There were struggles with intonation, and sometimes extravagance became exaggeration. But in the main this was a spirited rethinking of the repertory.