Richard Egarr seemed to know it was time to shake things up.
Sure, the 17th-century Austrian music that the harpsichordist and conductor was performing Thursday night with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra was sounding good at Minneapolis' Temple Israel, but perhaps it was getting a little too sonically unvarying and needed something ... unexpected.
So, Egarr sprinted offstage as the SPCO strings began plucking out a pizzicato soundscape. Soon, he re-emerged in a hooded black robe, holding an electric camp lantern, and singing a song in German, the aria of "The Nightwatchman" that gave the Heinrich Biber piece its name. Then he threw off his robe the way that funk patriarch James Brown used to, plopped down at his harpsichord, and the solemn nocturne gave way to a galloping gavotte.
This is the kind of thing Egarr does. And the concert proved one more richly enjoyable argument for why any Twin Citian with a soft spot for music of the Baroque era — such as J.S. Bach, Handel or Vivaldi — should seek out an opportunity to experience the ebullient Englishman's collaborations with the SPCO.
Lest you imagine that the former head of the London-based Academy of Ancient Music — a post he inherited from onetime SPCO music director Christopher Hogwood — has the kind of academic approach to music that the group's name might suggest, know that this SPCO artistic partner is intent on making sure you have a good time, when the music warrants it.
And this weekend's program certainly does. Yes, Biber's very evocative "Battalia" is a war story without words that embeds you in a platoon as it drunkenly caterwauls out a tune on the eve of battle, is thrown into the jaws of conflict and confronts its losses in a solemn postmortem. Yet Egarr and the SPCO made it all feel like a ripping yarn, a tale colorfully told.
That was but one of many highlights of this Germanic program of the 1600s and early 1700s. An air in Biber's "Mensa Sonora" sounded as beautiful as the Bach one dubbed the "Air on the G String" that surfaced later in the evening, although its tone was considerably sadder. And violinist Steven Copes nearly set his strings aflame during "Battalia" on a solo similar in spirit to something that would have exploded from Eddie Van Halen's guitar.
Different sonorities emerged for the concert's second half, as SPCO wind players lent their voices to the mix while the music leaped forward a few decades. In one of his many smile-inducing monologues sprinkled between the pieces, Egarr said that the music of Georg Philipp Telemann "tickles the ear," and such was the case with a pair of sprightly concertos for small ensemble in which the orchestra's musicians tossed short phrases between them like a football on a last-gasp lateral fest.
If all this seldom-heard music left any audience member longing for some familiarity, it arrived in a thrilling interpretation of J.S. Bach's Third Orchestral Suite, a trio of trumpets pushing a sense of majesty to the fore, that beloved Air donning becomingly rustic attire, and the lively concluding gigue bringing smiles to many a face both onstage and in the audience.
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra
What: Works by Heinrich Biber, Johann Schmelzer, Georg Philipp Telemann and J.S. Bach.
When and where: 8 p.m. Saturday, Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 3 p.m. Sunday, St. Andrew's Lutheran Church, 900 Stillwater Road, Mahtomedi.
Tickets: Free-$50, available at 651-291-1144 or thespco.org.
Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.
