Period pieces colored with swift tempo, raw passion

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is taking an eclectic, refreshingly non-doctrinaire look at 18th century music this season. In April, the orchestra will defy the edicts of fashion and musicological correctness by reaching back to Mozart’s lavish arrangement of Handel’s “Messiah.” Yet at the Alex Theatre on Saturday night, music director Jeffrey Kahane leaned in the other direction, incorporating period practices into a bracing program of 18th century music.

The forces were small, and the tempos were racing; at times, one wondered if the holiday hustle and bustle from Brand Boulevard and the Glendale Galleria nearby had infiltrated the music-making within the hall. The versatile strings convincingly molded Corelli’s “Christmas” Concerto in the swelling manner of a period orchestra, with little or no vibrato, while switching to more conventional bowing in Domenico Cimarosa’s by-the-book classical-period work, the Concerto for Two Flutes. Kahane also occasionally performed continuo parts on a small organ while directing traffic.

Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin took on a formidable challenge in trying to sing the outer movements of J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 51 at Kahane’s rollicking tempos; the fast runs passed in an indistinct blur. Yet Gauvin was more comfortable in Handel’s motet-in-search-of-an-opera, “Silete venti,” a strongly characterized performance with gusts of raw passion. Gauvin doesn’t dominate the stage per se, but she draws you in with her varied command of dynamics, weaving in and out of the orchestral texture, and in the final section, she could come up with dozens of ways to shade the single word, “alleluia.” The program also allowed individual soloists to shine. Trumpeter David Washburn crisply punched out each note in the Bach, hardly batting an eye at the swift pace, and flutists David Shostac’s and Susan Greenberg’s differing tone qualities complemented each other in near-perfect unison in the Cimarosa.