Spirited Solos Enliven L.A. Chamber’s Baroque Program at the Alex Theatre

It’s good to know that Monica Huggett, the English Baroque violin virtuoso/leader, has a mischievous sense of humor. Her creatively written bio notes that working with Ton Koopman made her realize that “she hadn’t missed out by not being a rock guitarist” and that “her discography is very long, perhaps too long.” Not that Huggett is a flamboyant performer-hardly-but you could feel some of that sense of fun in her concert with members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at the Alex Theatre Saturday night. She also displayed a knack for sifting some genuine, not-often-played pearls from out of the vast ocean of Baroque music.

Georg Muffat’s Armonico Tributo No. 2 in G minor leads off with a stunning, attention-grabbing Grave movement, and the rest of the suite runs at an impressively high level of invention. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s bracing Sinfonia in D minor-identified on the program as an Adagio and Fugue-is a truly great work, as contrapuntally inventive as anything by his famous father, and Huggett and the LACO gave it a fast-paced, sweeping, lushly terraced ride.

The above pieces formed the concert’s bookends, surrounding a trio of features for soloists from the orchestra and Huggett herself. Bassoonist Kenneth Munday’s articulation was as smooth as creamy peanut butter in the Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto in E minor, RV 484; flutist David Shostac blended self-effacingly into the LACO in J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 2 in B minor, emerging with some flippant phrasings in the concluding Badinerie. Huggett used her gut-stringed instrument in Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in D, RV 208, producing a slender, silky tone in marked, yet not distractingly incongruous contrast to that of the conventionally stringed violins in the LACO.