Music Reviews : L.A. Baroque Orchestra Opens Fourth Season

The intrepid Gregory Maldonado and his band of antiquarians, the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, opened their fourth season on Friday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Santa Monica with an overly ambitious program of 17th- and 18th-Century instrumental music for the theaters of London and Paris.

The strain imposed by the evening’s length and the jungle heat of St. Paul’s ultimately savaged the violins’ gut strings, the oboes’ intonation and the players’ concentration in what had begun as a noble, stylish performance of a 26-movement(!) suite from Rameau’s opera “Les Indes Galantes.”

The concert began promisingly. The orchestra, 20 strong and led, as ever, from the concertmaster’s chair by Maldonado, quickly settled into a characterful suite from Thomas Arne’s “The Judgement of Paris” with execution that was, for the most part, energetic and orderly.

A hyper-extended sequence of snippets from Lully’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” needed rhythmic tightening and, perhaps, even (blasphemy!) a two-handed conductor. But there were rewards in the neatly turned violin duet of Maldonado and Jolianne von Einem, the ethereal tones coaxed by Stephen Schultz from his keyless (wooden) transverse flute, and Edward Murray’s imaginatively realized harpsichord continuo.

Ultimately, however, the evening belonged to Purcell and the grand airs from his “King Arthur”--a welcome, robust antidote to the French composers’ incessant gracefulness.

Purcell, too, was accorded the most consistent playing of the evening: firm in ensemble and intonation, broad, even sentimental, in the sublime “Bright Nymphs of Britain” melody and the “Symphony,” with its haunting violin arabesques.