Joys and Perils of Old Baroque

It’s easy to giggle at musicians who specialize in outmoded instruments and performance practices. Indeed, the scene at Irvine Barclay Theatre might have come from Dr. Seuss, with one player wielding a theorbo (a lute, comically enlarged) and a pair of soloists bearing elongated trumpets straight out of Whoville.

But creating performances that are historically accurate is a noble calling and increasingly popular with audiences. The venerable Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of San Francisco, one of the world’s best known practitioners of the craft, has appeared regularly in Orange County for years, and they were greeted again Thursday night by a large and appreciative crowd.

In a concert sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County’s Eclectic Orange Festival, the small orchestra and its longtime conductor Nicholas McGegan illustrated the joys--and, alas, the perils--of music recreated as it once was played, not interpreted according to modern tastes.

The joys are in hearing such an accomplished group dance through, for example, the rich, overlapping layers of Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 8, or especially in soprano Christine Brandes singing Vivaldi and Bach with a voice of unerring beauty.

The peril, to put it bluntly: In the hands of dedicated specialists, this kind of music can be dull and pedantic.

Vivaldi’s Double Trumpet Concerto in C, a work well known to fans of Baroque brass music, illustrates the point. It should have been an electric opening to the concert, with florid and soaring parts for the solo instruments and driving rhythms in the strings. Instead it was careful, bloodless, disappointing.

Granted, soloists Fred Holmgren and John Thiessen are experts in playing very difficult instruments. Though the valveless trumpet of Vivaldi’s day is treacherous and exacting, they managed to hit all the notes and stay both in tune and in rhythm. But in their attention to accuracy, they neglected to put much life into the performance.

Things went from dull to dreary with the Vivaldi violin concerto that followed. Playing with mutes, the strings produced a dulcet, fragile sound verging on the insubstantial. And soloist Lisa Weiss--but for a vivid little cadenza at the end of the piece--sounded like she was locked in a closet.

With “Laudate Pueri,” a short psalm setting also by Vivaldi, soprano Brandes helped revive the energy level, delivering a gorgeous performance of music that is rapturous, clarion and lamenting by turns.

Her bright, clear tone--with just a hint of roundness--is especially well-suited to this kind of music. Far more than most singers, who too often can hear only themselves, she meshes with the instrumentalists in tone quality, pitch and musical spirit.

Brandes was just as impressive in the final work of the concert, Bach’s cantata “Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen,” BWV 51. Particularly in the recitative, she drew every bit of the music’s heartbreaking character off the page.