Music / Distracted Minds, Apeiron Baroque. At Wesley Uniting Church, November 8. Reviewed by NICK HORN

For the past 5 years, John Ma and Marie Searles’ Apeiron Baroque has brought the sass and sizzle of chamber music from the 17^th and 18^th century, as performed some of Australia’s best early music speclialists, to appreciative local audiences.

The latest offering did not disappoint. Ma (baroque violin and viola, viola d’amore) and Searles (harpsichord) were joined by Adam Masters (baroque oboe), Tim Willis (baroque violin, viola d’amore) and Ben Hoadley (baroque bassoon) for a charming program ranging from the early baroque (Dario Castello, early 17^th c.) to the Galant style of the mid-18^th c. (J S Bach’s contemporary, Johann Janitsch).

John Ma introduced each item with characteristic informal jocularity, though some of us found our own minds unsettlingly distracted from the flow of the performance, and would have preferred old-school written notes.

Apeiron made a pleasing, balanced sound, with the timbral edge of the strings softened by the warmth of the winds, supported unobtrusively by Searles on harpsichord.

A notable feature was Hoadley’s stylistically informed interpretation, ensuring that the bassoon line moved smoothly between its role as continuo and as an equal partner with strings and oboe.

Castello’s trio sonata for 2 violins and bassoon opened the concert with rapidly shifting moods like clouds racing across the sky, allowing the violins to show off their chops with competitive virtuosic playing, mediated by the warm bassoon lines emerging periodically to settle the ensemble down.

Johannes Graun’s trio sonata paired Willis on violin with Masters on oboe in delightful call-and-response passages.

Ma made the most of the drama of Pietro Locatelli’s sonata for violin and continuo with whispered pianissimos and breathless sudden silences in the slower movements, launching into faster passages with palpable relish.

A viola d’amore duo by Wilhelm Ganspeckh was a wonderful advertisement for this sweetly resonant instrument (a kind of alto viol with sympathetic unbowed strings). Ma and Willis, playing in perfect sympathy, like their strings, displayed a lyric touch in the Overture and a lovely bounce in the Gavotte and Chaconne movements.

The highlight of the program was Janitsch’s Quadro Sonata in G minor for oboe, violin, viola and continuo, an elegy for the composer’s son, who had died at a young age.

Apeiron’s passionate performance reached its apotheosis with Adam Masters’ heart-stoppingly expressive rendering of the Lutheran chorale O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded on oboe, threaded tenderly through a lacework of strings and bassoon.

The program continued with a graceful work by Johann Pez and the virtuoso variations of Johann Meister’s Ciaconna (each for 2 violins).

Henricus Albicastro’s contemplative Adagio concluded the concert, featuring Masters’ gorgeously lyrical oboe melody rising like curling smoke from the smouldering slow tremelo of strings, harpsichord and bassoon.

Apeiron presented a superb performance, at times lightly thrown off with wit and deceptive ease, at times deeply felt, of works that deserve to be better known and more frequently played.

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