Baroque music is made startling, new

Originally founded in 1726 and revived by Christopher Hogwood in 1973, Britain’s Academy of Ancient Music, despite the sound of its name, is one of the more rousing ensembles around. As heard in the acoustically inviting Founder’s Hall of the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday, it brings Baroque music to life by pumping blood and volatile energy into music that can be glossily homogenous.

The period-instrument ensemble’s energizing crusade is particularly evident on musical turf as ultra-familiar as Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” which anchored each of the concert’s halves. As leader Andrew Manze noted in his program note, Vivaldi’s classic is inescapable, even heard as a cell-phone ring. But the music seemed brand new, in the moment, and re-thought on Sunday. Tempos swerved from hurtling to languid, and textures turned on a series of well-placed dimes, to exhilarating effect.

The ensemble’s string players stand, with harpsichord, theorbo (a kind of lute), cello and bass sitting down, and they produce a bracingly vibrant sound. At the center of attention was the inspiring violinist Manze, in his final U.S. appearance in the role of the academy’s director, the conducting force for the group’s nuanced storm. Manze played his solo parts with engagingly unpolished intensity, by turns frenzied and tender.

“The Four Seasons” dominated the program, but it was fleshed out with other boldly played Baroque works, from the well-known Handel Concerto Grosso in G Minor, Opus 6, No. 6, to Biber’s lesser-known “Sonata: the peasants’ church procession” -- all brusque jollity mixed with decorous restraint. Rough textures and jagged dynamic contouring may still strike the ears of those outside the devoted period-instrument audience as something startling, even radical, but the Academy of Ancient Music has the right stuff to make instant believers, especially when heard live.