Baroque'n'roll

Period instrument group Il Giardino Armonico pride themselves on putting the swing into early music, writes WILLIAM DART.

This week Aucklanders will have the chance to experience the charm, vigour and occasional wildness of the Baroque when Il Giardino Armonico take over the Town Hall concert chamber.

Luca Pianca is lutenist with the group and a livewire who confesses he started on electric guitar back in the 70s, "trying to sound like Led Zeppelin". The turning point was study with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Vienna and the wannabe Jimmy Page turned to the world of early music.

Pianca talks about the group he co-founded. The musicians came together in 1985 as specialists and enthusiasts and are "always experimenting, trying to find the right mixture of colours. We still spend a certain amount of time every month trying to find our own sound, which comes from the common language we speak together as players".

To many, these musicians are known for their participation in Cecilia Bartoli's Grammy-winning Vivaldi CD. "It was by listening to Bartoli's singing that we heard how we could play our instrumental music. We found that we didn't have to speak very much, just play," says Pianca.

Listening to the group's wonderful new CD, Musica Barocca, you'd swear that Handel's Queen of Sheba had never made so sprightly an arrival, or that Bach's D major Suite had never been delivered with such a swing - little wonder that one American critic hailed them as the Duke Ellington band of period instrument groups.

Pianca likes the image: "That is part of the music. If you play music without swing, then it's dead music."

You can hear and see the group on their new DVD as Il Giardino play in and around the tourist beauties of Italy. What was behind this venture? "Advertising," Pianca replies, with a hearty laugh. "We went to nice places, ate nice food. We were happy to do all this as long as they didn't ask us to be actors."

But then it's their music that does the acting for them, and this is what separates them from their competitors.

Pianca is keen to run over Wednesday night's programme which opens with Biber's Battaglia - "a very strange piece for its period, with its representation of a battle".

Perhaps he's heard we're a peace-loving people down here - he's quick to assure me Biber "is not glorifying victory, but painting the cries of the people. It's a work with an eternal message".

A Sammartini flute concerto is "very gallant, not at all disturbing", but there are storm warnings for the Handel Concerto Grosso - this composer was "a wild, wild guy". Expect some possessed playing too from flutist Giovanni Antonini in his Vivaldi Concerto, which Pianca promises will end with "a huge explosion of fireworks".

There are two members of the Bach family in Wednesday's concert. Johann Sebastian's D minor Harpsichord Concerto is "one of his best, and we're doing it just like Bach intended it, with an orchestra of 14 players, which means you can get the right transparency of sound". The other Bach is son Carl Philip Emmanuel and Pianca is playing a lute sonata - "a marvellous work, written in the composer's late style, when he was interested in a new instrument that combined the lute with a keyboard".

And if there are encores being given out, who knows but Signor Pianca might just have Led Zeppelin's Battle of Nevermore in his lute-case.

* Il Giardino Armonico at the Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber, Wednesday at 8pm.