In very talented company

Richard Tognetti is artistic director and leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which appeared at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday night and at UCLA on Friday. He is an official national living treasure in Australia and plays a precious 1759 Guadagnini violin. But what he plays on it could be almost anything.

The Southland programs did not exclude traditional old music, such as full helpings of Corelli, Bach and Haydn, to go along with his old violin. But Tognetti can’t be easily pinned down. His arrangement of Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 2 for string orchestra concluded both programs. On Tognetti’s resume are such items as playing Brahms with early music specialists, giving the Australian premiere of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, composing the score for the recent film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” and collaborating with pop musicians on various projects.

But let’s first judge Tognetti -- who has the mussed-hair, slept-in-clothes look of an aging rock star -- by the company he keeps. In Orange County, Piotr Anderszewski, the electrifying young Polish pianist, performed concertos by Bach and Haydn. At Royce Hall, the beloved American soprano Dawn Upshaw sang arias from Bach cantatas and arrangements of Hungarian folk songs that Tognetti had made for her.

These are searching soloists with highly distinct styles who do not follow the usual career paths. In Bach’s D-Minor Concerto, Anderszewski, half-hip and half-nerd in leather pants and double-breasted blazer, was an excavator. His intense tone had the quality of digging deep inside the keys of the piano as if Bach were a rich, organic sonic soil to be plumbed. In the last movement, he took out the circular saws and chipped away at bedrock, letting spark fly.

In Haydn’s D-Major Concerto, the pianist took on a startlingly different persona, playful in the first movement, time-stoppingly ethereal in the slow movement and the riotous life of the party in the last movement, which is a Hungarian dance.

Choosing Bach and Hungarian music as well the next night, Upshaw offered not so much a contrast as a further investigation into the field. The three arias (from Cantatas Nos. 202, 105 and 199), all for string accompaniment with oboe obbligato, provided a mini drama of shaking off sin and basking in blessing. The Hungarian folk songs, source material for Bartok and Kodaly, are earthier, of course, than Bach, but they too are concerned with brightening the sad heart.

Upshaw, recently back from an enforced four-month rest while recovering from a lingering vocal infection, has a new freshness and elegance in her appearance and voice. Her Bach was interior, an invitation into reflection, exquisitely sung. The Hungarian songs, whether bluesy or dancey, left the impression of pent-up emotion released.

Tognetti did not take a substantially different approach to accompanying these two different kinds of soloists, or, for that matter, to playing in two different kinds of venues -- the intimate Founders room at the Orange County center or the more traditional proscenium stage of Royce. (The soloists even got exactly the same box of flowers at curtain call.) Whether for Baroque music or his robust arrangements of the Hungarian songs or Szymanowski’s quartet, which also utilizes folk sources, he showed himself a power player who rarely held himself or his ensemble back.

But that doesn’t mean that he or they don’t listen. Tognetti’s sound -- and his orchestra’s sound -- has rough edges, and those rough edges are a kind of glory. Theirs is the aggressive give-and-take approach of musicians playing for themselves -- the take, sometimes, as in take no prisoners. This is obviously just the kind of music-making on which Anderszewski and Upshaw thrive. But it also made Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6, No. 4 overwhelming fun (and overwhelming sonically for the poor, unheard harpsichord) and the Szymanowski quartet arresting.

At UCLA, there was also a short contemporary piece by a young Australian-based composer, Georges Lentz. He’s heard Gorecki, and his slight innovation is to break up lush mystical consonances with some rasps of the bows. There was not much to it, but the big, glowing string sound was engrossing and the angry slashing sounds had the vivid irreverence of taking a knife to a beautiful painting.