Stately Setting Adds Elan to Baroque Pieces

The Chamber Music in Historic Sites series served as an escape hatch, or a cocoon, from everyday madness Sunday afternoon with a particularly apt combination of sight and sound. This time, the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College placed La Musique’s program of French Baroque chamber music in a stately, classically formal Pasadena replica of Le Petit Trianon, the Versailles garden pavilion built during Louis XV’s reign.

In all honesty, the music could not have swept the listener away all by itself.

Under the direction of Edward Murray, La Musique gathers together some experienced early-music players--Ingrid Matthews (Baroque violin), Courtney Westcott (flute) and William Skeen (viola da gamba)--who are now based on the West Coast. Despite the atmospheric allure of the setting, enhanced by a stunningly painted modern reproduction of an 18th century French harpsichord--the lineup of five short chamber works by Couperin, Boismortier, Rameau, Marais and Corrette was mostly of slight interest.

The Quatrieme Concert from Rameau’s Pieces de Clavecin en Concerts was the most brilliant and substantial piece, played with bracingly fast tempos. Marais’ lament for viola da gamba and harpsichord “Tombeau de Monsieur de St. Colombe,” served as a change of pace, and there was an unlisted, heavily ornamented piece for solo harpsichord, “Allemande la Labarde,” by Forqueray. Violist Jane Levy joined the quartet in a sometimes scrappy rendition of Corrette’s Concerto Comique No. 25 at the close.