Music Reviews : L.A. Baroque Orchestra Opens Its Sixth Season

The Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra opened its sixth season Friday night with what looked like, on paper, an adventuresome and carefully balanced program: seldom-ventured works by Telemann and the little-known Jan Dismas Zelenka interspersed with two of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos.

As it turned out, perhaps not so surprisingly, it was the familiar Bach that shone and the rarities that disappointed.

Telemann’s Overture in C for three oboes, strings and continuo began the concert--at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica and slated for repeats in Long Beach and Pasadena over the weekend--with assembly-line predictability, its eight movements offering pleasantries of a forgettable sort.

The orchestra--a strictly period-instrument, authentic-performance group, led by music director Gregory Maldonado at the violin--gave a confident and rhythmically alert account, though the oboe concertante , standing in the rear, was not always sonically in focus.

Later came Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G, which seems, if possible, even more routine a creation, with its formulaic motives cranked through a myriad of sequences and unremarkable harmonies. Principal violist Andrew Picken proved an assured and easygoing soloist nevertheless.

Zelenka’s Capriccio No. 3 is noteworthy chiefly for its savagely difficult horn writing, much of it stratospherically high. The ensemble’s able hornists--who perform, of course, on valveless instruments--gave a valiant effort in what turned out a hit-or-miss affair: bold and glorious when on the mark, painful when not.

The familiar “Brandenburgs,” then, plainly stood out. Maldonado and orchestra offered a typically vivacious reading of the First Concerto, with swinging fluidity and vigorous cross-rhythms. With one player to a part, the Third Concerto suffered somewhat from diffuseness of line and uneven balances, in an otherwise ruggedly sculpted reading.