Academie keeps nutty side in check -- sort of

Forget the stuffy name. Academie fur Alte Musik Berlin is early music’s Bang on a Can All Stars. And forget the creaky old instruments too. Kinky, quirky, quick, these staggeringly good players have a taste for the offbeat. In fact, one of their terrific recent Harmonia Mundi albums is titled “La Bizarre.” No table music this, it is the oddball other side of Telemann. Who knew?

Completing its much-belated first American tour at Royce Hall on Wednesday night, the Academy was on its best behavior for UCLA Live in that the music it chose was relatively safe, relatively tame, big-name Baroque -- Bach, Handel, Vivaldi. Not until the end was there a concerto by Francesco Geminiani’s that got a bit nutty.

But no matter. Everything was played with fire, flair, a hard percussive ferocity and daredevil virtuosity. There was nothing dainty about these 17 gut-strung string instruments, honky woodwinds, tinkly harpsichord and lute. They made a surprisingly big, even raucous sound. I would like to see what might happen if someone were to dress the players a little better (they try with their red and black outfits but don’t quite make it), mike them, put them on a stadium stage and amplify them really loud.

The Academy is a collective that started 23 years ago in East Berlin as a rebellion against the stiflingly traditional musical life imposed by the government. Berlin may have some of the world’s best antiquarian museums, but the city, East or West, has never been in the forefront of the early music movement. Think Bach and Berlin, and Herbert von Karajan’s super lush Berlin Philharmonic sugarcoating is probably what first comes to mind.

These Berliners’ Bach on Wednesday was driven to the edge or otherwise unhinged. Georg Kallweit and Midori Seiler gave the Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor an almost cabaret seductiveness to the solos. Meanwhile the Suite in C was about as boisterous as Bach can get.

Here the violinist Stephan Mai was the leader. He has close cropped hair and a long, gray Sigmund Freud beard. But it was Walt Whitman, an old poet willing to lose himself in dance and the senses, who kept coming to mind, as Mai stomped, crouched, swayed, wiggled and other wise rocked ‘n’ rolled, all the while enticing playing of exceptional accuracy and rhythmic excitement at madcap tempos from the band.

The concert began with a suite from a rare, early Handel opera, “Almira,” wonderfully lithe and colored. A Vivaldi concerto for two oboes had sweet, wry solos from Xenia Loffler and Michael Bosch.

But it wasn’t until the last piece, Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso No. 12, that the Academy finally started to reveal its true inner strangeness. This is a set of variations on the traditional “mad” theme, follia (the Academy seems to have a fixation with the theme and has dug up esoteric uses of it in its most recent CD of obscure opera overtures).

Mad the playing was too. At the performance’s most deranged, violinists in the back banged (and not lightly) on their instruments with the wood of their bows.

I have my doubts that Baroque period performances were nearly so radical. You have to live in today’s world, and probably in Berlin, to come up with playing this avant-garde.