Rebel Ensemble Takes a New Look at Bachs

The Bach boom continued with the return of Rebel on Saturday afternoon at Second Church of Christ Scientist. The period-instrument ensemble, now in residence at Trinity Church in New York City, offered a smart, lively program of music by Bach, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and C.P.E.’s godfather, Telemann, in the magnificently domed church for Chamber Music in Historic Sites.

The ensemble, named for a French Baroque composer, seems a highly mutable one in personnel. The constants over the last decade have been its founders, violinists Jorg-Michael Schwarz and Karen Marie Marmer. Their distinctive, very active approach to this music was readily apparent in C.P.E.’s oddball Sonata in C minor, “Sanguineus and Melancholicus,” as they added vaudeville pantomime to the composer’s already over-the-top instrumental character drama.

This flamboyant, interventionist style emboldened all the music on the program with accent and color. Add utterly fearless, risk-everything playing to the mix--Schwarz loves a percussive down-bow crunch and the whine of his open E string--and you get astonishingly vital music-making that can also slip over the edge into exaggeration.

The featured soloist, however, was a paragon of characterful elegance as well as virtuoso flair. Flutist Matthias Maute captured both the seriousness and the insouciance of Bach’s B-minor Suite, and, on a type of sopranino recorder, the more conventional charms of Telemann’s Ouverture in E flat. He also partnered Marmer to pertly graceful effect in a Sonata in G attributed to Bach.

The solidly expressive supporting team throughout was harpsichordist Dongsok Shin, cellist John Moran and John Dornenberg on violone.