Dance & Music Reviews : I Solisti di Zagreb in Croatian Benefit

Despite the tragic motivation for the concert by I Solisti di Zagreb--to raise funds for Croatian relief--the atmosphere on Sunday in the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre was that of a party, with good feelings flowing between the stage and the partisan audience.

Nor was there a shortage of polished execution from the dozen strings and harpsichord, directed by concertmaster Tonko Ninic, whose collective name has been with us since the mid-1950s heyday of the traveling string band.

And the name was matched to a time-warp performing style, barely modified to indicate an acquaintance with today’s leaner, more rhythm-oriented notions of 18th-Century practice.

Thus, in a concerto grosso by Vivaldi and a concertino once attributed to Pergolesi (these days to “Spurious”), we heard lush string vibrato and the expressive, gliding manner that defined Baroque to audiences a quarter-century and more ago.

There was a welcome taste of tension in a trio of Handel’s more rarely encountered German arias, featuring the rhythmically alert, if vibrato-laden soprano of Cynthia Hansell-Bakic.

Barber’s “Adagio” and Britten’s similarly omnipresent “Simple Symphony” were delivered in easygoing, rather disengaged fashion, while the superheated Scherzo of Croatian composer Fran Lhotka (1883-1962) provided a tantalizing glimpse of how accomplished the Solisti can be in repertory dependent less on formal propriety than folksy spiritedness.