Music Reviews : Philharmonia Baroque

Nicholas McGegan and his Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, who paid their annual visit to Ambassador Auditorium Sunday afternoon, tend to become addictive. Not only for playing as well as they do, but for the manner in which they play well: with bracingly clean lightness of sonority and a darting, bouncing rhythmic vitality founded on the belief that all Baroque instrumental music has its origin in the dance.

That is McGegan’s way and his forces respond to it with disarming naturalness, enthusiasm and skill.

Sunday’s program was devoted to Handel: his “Tolomeo” Overture; the G-minor Oboe Concerto, with soloist Stanley King; a pair of Concerti Grossi; and the Suite in F from the “Water Musick.”

Not a musical also-ran in the lot. But it was the “Water Musick” that stood out, at once for being familiar in content and unfamiliar in style of presentation: briskly, keenly articulated, with more elaborate ornamentation of the solo lines--extending even to the horn parts, played with dazzling aplomb on valveless instruments by Lowell Greer and R. J. Kelley--than one hears from such competitor period-performance specialists as the English Concert and Academy of Ancient Music.

It is, however, difficult to become accustomed in McGegan’s recent performances to the near-absence of a characteristic sound of Baroque music, that of the continuo harpsichord. McGegan, standing in front of (rather than seated at) the harpsichord and conducting with both hands, has scant opportunity for more than the occasional, seemingly gratuitous, left-hand keyboard chord or arpeggio.