Cummings brings fresh vitality to rarities in auspicious MOB debut

No, that wasn’t one of Charles Ives’ cacophonous aural landscapes that opened the weekend concerts by Music of the Baroque. Rather, it was the imaginative introduction to a French baroque dance suite that antedated Ives’ gnarly sonic experiments by several centuries.

The work in question, Les Elemens, by the little-known French composer Jean-Fery Rebel, appropriately launched an absorbing program of 18th century French and Italian orchestral pieces related to the four elements: earth, air, fire and water.

British guest conductor Laurence Cummings, in his overdue Chicago debut, made certain that the revolutionary dissonances that depict chaos at the start of Rebel’s 1737 suite registered with proper impact. As much could be said for his crisp and lively direction, along with engaging narration, of the entire program, heard Monday evening at the Harris Theater.

Works by Georg Philipp Telemann, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Rebel gave the 27 excellent MOB instrumentalists a rare opportunity to branch out into repertoire that, with the exception of a concerto from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, was no doubt unfamiliar to most of them.

You would expect no less stylish results from the music director (since 2020) of the London-based, much-recorded Academy of Ancient Music: a worthy successor to Christopher Hogwood and Richard Egarr, based on the results he achieved on Monday. Management in fact would be seriously remiss not to invite Cummings back as soon as possible.

As with his MOB countrymen-colleagues Jane Glover and Nicholas Kraemer, Cummings is a past master at getting players of modern instrument orchestras to sound convincingly “period.” This was clear straight away from his subtle yet firm handling of the Rebel. Once the sparring elements had settled into their natural order, the ensuing dances came off irresistibly: textures light and airy, rhythms neatly inflected, avian chirps emerging cleanly from the paired recorders and flutes.

Water is the central programmatic element in both Telemann’s 1723 Water Music (Ebb and Flow) and the suite from Rameau’s 1748 Nais. The Telemann celebrates the anniversary of Hamburg’s admiralty, while Rameau’s pastorale heroique honors the treaty that ended the War of Austrian Succession. Like Les Elemens, each piece is a succession of charming dances.

Directing from the harpsichord, in the Telemann suite as well as in the remaining fare, Cummings fairly levitated in sync with his sprightly tempos, never missing a note on the keyboard. Guest player Dusan Balarin lent the distinctive colors of his theorbo and baroque guitar to the tonal mix. One was left wondering why Telemann’s splendidly inventive Wassermusik remains a poor relation to Handel’s overplayed suite of the same name.

So, too, the neglected Rameau suite, its ballet sequences drawn from a grand mythological spectacle, set in ancient Corinth, about the sea god Neptune assuming human form to pursue the nymph Nais. Cummings and company saw to it that each dance had its own distinct musical character, not least the Overture with its snappy syncopated trumpets and insistent drumbeat.

A minor disappointment in MOB’s sparky foray into the “Autumn” concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was that the conductor-narrator did not read the sonnet that accompanies this programmatic depiction of peasants celebrating a bountiful harvest. Concertmaster Gina DiBello was the vivacious violin soloist, nudging autumnal chill from the scene-setting first movement and foot-stomping drunkenness from the finale.