Playing Bach as Bach intended

As Richard Egarr came to the end of his long harpsichord solo in Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, the audience broke into applause. People do that routinely at jazz concerts but not classical ones. They’re supposed to hold their appreciation -- if they know the rules -- until the end of a piece. What was going on?

The audience Sunday afternoon in the Queen’s Salon of the RMS Queen Mary was reacting spontaneously not only to Egarr’s exciting, fluent playing but also to the superb, precise entrance of his Academy of Ancient Music colleagues, playing aboard the berthed ocean liner as part of the Music in Historic Sites series sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College.

Far from not knowing the rules, these spectators were reacting probably very much as Bach’s first listeners did in the coffeehouse where the concerto saw the light of day, before the rules got written.

This was the same work played a few days before in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall by Murray Perahia and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. But there were major differences. Perahia used a modern concert grand; Egarr, a harpsichord. The St. Martin musicians played modern instruments, and there were about 30 of them. Egarr’s ensemble played period instruments, and there were only a handful, one per part, as Bach probably intended. Disney Hall, designed for an orchestra, seats more than 2,200. The Queen’s Salon, meant for general entertainment, including movies, seats a few hundred.

Both performances were terrific. But they offered different values. Egarr and the Ancient Academy musicians let us hear the work as a chamber concerto. In their version, the orchestral instruments are more soft-toned and dynamically equal than their modern counterparts, so musical emphasis shifted as the scoring changed. Blending of colors was more subtle. Individual contributions could be savored.

These virtues were evident throughout Sunday’s all-Bach program. Rachel Brown was the steady, virtuosic flutist in the composer’s Suite No. 2. Egarr was the soloist in the D-minor and A-major concertos. But for all these musicians’ prominence, they would no doubt be the first to emphasize how much they were a part of the ensemble, which also includes Pavlo Beznosiuk and Rodolfo Richter, violins; Trevor Jones, viola; Alison McGillivray, cello; Malachy Robinson, bass; and William Carter, theorbo. Their single encore was the enchanting last movement of Vivaldi’s C-major Concerto for Flautino.