Richard Egarr leads SPCO in spirited, dramatic Baroque music concert events

Richard Egarr appeared to realize it was time to shake issues up.

Positive, the Seventeenth-century Austrian music that the harpsichordist and conductor was performing Thursday evening with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra was sounding good at Minneapolis’ Temple Israel, however maybe it was getting slightly too sonically unvarying and wanted one thing … surprising.

So, Egarr sprinted offstage because the SPCO strings started plucking out a pizzicato soundscape. Quickly, he re-emerged in a hooded black gown, holding an electrical camp lantern, and singing a music in German, the aria of “The Nightwatchman” that gave the Heinrich Biber piece its identify. Then he threw off his gown the best way that funk patriarch James Brown used to, plopped down at his harpsichord, and the solemn nocturne gave method to a galloping gavotte.

That is the sort of factor Egarr does. And the live performance proved yet one more richly satisfying argument for why any Twin Citian with a delicate spot for music of the Baroque period — equivalent to J.S. Bach, Handel or Vivaldi — ought to hunt down a chance to expertise the ebullient Englishman’s collaborations with the SPCO.

Lest you think about that the previous head of the London-based Academy of Historic Music — a submit he inherited from former SPCO music director Christopher Hogwood — has the sort of educational strategy to music that the group’s identify may counsel, know that this SPCO creative companion is intent on ensuring you may have a superb time, when the music warrants it.

And this weekend’s program definitely does. Sure, Biber’s very evocative “Battalia” is a battle story with out phrases that embeds you in a platoon because it drunkenly caterwauls out a tune on the eve of battle, is thrown into the jaws of battle and confronts its losses in a solemn postmortem. But Egarr and the SPCO made all of it really feel like a ripping yarn, a story colorfully informed.

That was however one in all many highlights of this Germanic program of the 1600s and early 1700s. An air in Biber’s “Mensa Sonora” sounded as stunning because the Bach one dubbed the “Air on the G String” that surfaced later within the night, though its spirit was significantly sadder. And violinist Steven Copes practically set his strings aflame throughout “Battalia” on a solo comparable in spirit to one thing that may have exploded from Eddie Van Halen’s guitar.

Totally different sonorities emerged on the live performance’s second half, as SPCO wind gamers lent their voices to the combination whereas the music leaped ahead a couple of a long time. In one in all his many smile-inducing monologues sprinkled between the items, Egarr stated that the music of Georg Philipp Telemann “tickles the ear,” and such was the case with a pair of sprightly concertos for small ensemble wherein the orchestra’s musicians tossed brief phrases between them like a soccer on a last-gasp lateral fest.

If all this seldom-heard music left any viewers member eager for some familiarity, it arrived in an exciting interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite, a trio of trumpets pushing a way of splendor to the fore, that beloved Air donning becomingly rustic apparel, and the full of life concluding gigue bringing smiles to many a face each onstage and within the viewers.

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra

What: Works by Heinrich Biber, Johann Schmelzer, Georg Philipp Telemann and J.S. Bach

When and the place: 8 p.m. Saturday, Ordway Live performance Corridor, 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 3 p.m. Sunday, St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, 900 Stillwater Highway, Mahtomedi

Tickets: Free-$50, out there at 651-291-1144 or thespco.org

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music author. Attain him at wordhub@yahoo.com.