Music Reviews : Lloyd Rodgers Premiere at Baroque Festival

Crammed together within the short space of eight days, the annual, four-event Baroque Music Festival of Corona del Mar may be an embarrassment of riches for the beach community. More important, it may be too much, too quick for the gifted and accomplished musicians who take part in it.

Stylish and committed but too often unpolished, the performances given Friday night at Sherman Gardens in the third of the four concerts of the 1989 series earned admiration for their professionalism and sincerity, but sometimes fell short of standards of previous festivals.

On a program climaxing with John Blow’s masque, “Venus and Adonis,” Burton Karson, founder and artistic director of the festival, arranged a fascinating prelude consisting of music by Blow’s near-contemporaries Purcell, Lanier and Lawes, plus 20th-Century, Baroque-derived works by Halsey Stevens and Lloyd Rodgers (contemporaries of Karson). The juxtapositions became revelatory.

Following Lawes’ setting of “Go, Lovely Rose” with two different realizations of the same poem by Stevens (dated 1942 and 1954) illuminated the charms of all three settings; it also made comment on the continuity of art across the centuries.

In its aesthetic, its instrumentation--mezzo solo with string quartet, harpsichord and guitar--and its inspiration (the birth of Adonis), Rodgers’ gripping, but not abrasive, “Lamentation of Myrrha,” achieves several points of contact with Blow’s proto-opera of 1685.

Its aural orientation also makes for an appropriate match with “Venus and Adonis.” At this premiere performance, Lori Marcum was the intense, full-throated vocal soloist; the composer led a careful and apparently tight first hearing.

The surrounding performances displayed high spirits and inconsistent detailing. Soprano Laura Fries and baritone Donald Christensen sang the title parts in Blow’s masterpiece with special attention to textual nuance; as Cupid, tenor Gregory Wait performed strongly with a voice that now seems frayed.

From the harpsichord, Karson led his instrumental and vocal forces in a reading that alternated between balance and anarchy.