Since the 1950s, the way we perform and understand Baroque music has changed significantly.

At first this music was guarded as the special province of academics and motivated amateurs, a virtual cottage industry, but in more recent years this repertory has been reclaimed by virtuosos, conservatories and mainstream opera companies.

Fifty years ago, it was unthinkable that the Met would stage a lavish Baroque pastiche such as this season’s “Enchanted Island”—with some of the biggest names in opera—to rapturous acclaim. Nor would anyone have predicted that music students today would be begging to crash early music courses at the tradition-bound Juilliard School of Music.

Today’s Baroque vocal style is highly dramatic, resonant, and assertive, all the qualities that were missing from Emma Kirkby’s performance Monday (Jan. 30) for the San Diego Early Music Society at St. James Episcopal Church in La Jolla.

The noted and much honored English soprano (to be completely accurate, she is Dame Carolyn Emma Kirkby) has been a fixture of the early music world for nearly four decades, and there is no corner of this vast repertory she has not at least touched on in her catalogue of over 100 recordings. By choosing a program devoted to G. F. Handel and J. S. Bach, however, she underscored the polarity between her pale, delicate timbre with its feathery, precious phrasing and current practice.

Her arias from Handel’s “Solomon” and “Alceste” hovered wanly with little sense of dramatic urgency. And especially when she was singing in English, her underpowered lyrics were difficult to discern.

She was wise to share the program with the young Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor, whose voice had more presence and bloom in the room. In a duet from Handel’s “Judas Maccabeus,” they engaged in stylish ornamentation in effusive parallel thrids that enlivened the Handel half of the program considerably. I personally felt she rose to his energy level and stronger sense of musical propulsion.

The program listed the Los Angeles-based Musica Angelica Orchestra as the third component of the concert, but five string players and a harpsichordist is far too modest an ensemble to pass for an orchestra. This ensemble opened with a rather studied and uninflected account of Handel’s “Concerto Grosso in A Major,” Op. 6, No. 11, with Martin Haselböck directing from the harpsichord. Either his instrument was too small for the room or his keyboard playing was simply too bland.

Of the string players, cellist Ezra Seltzer and bassist Curtis Daily stood out for their consistently incisive, animated lines. In lieu of Handel’s G Major Sonata from Op. 5, Musica Angelica substituted (but did not announce the change) a C Minor sonata da chiesa from the composer’s Opus 2, which proved less soporific than the Concerto Grosso.

I confess that I had never previously heard nor even read about J. S. Bach’s odd revision of the well-known Pergolesi “Stabat Mater” into a German-language sacred cantata based on a dark, Pietistic interpretation of Psalm 51 from the Hebrew Bible.

If “Tilge, Höchster meine Sünden,“ BWV 1083, a cantata for two solo voices and strings, lacks the labyrinthine contrapuntal interest of Bach’s own sacred cantatas, it does have a moody harmonic palette that no doubt appealed to the Leipzig master.

Kirkby and Taylor uncovered in the alternating solos and duets of this cantata that deep vein of introspective Lutheran spiritual anguish with sympathetic, earnest conviction. In the few verses that spoke of joy and confidence, the singers rose to a level of avidity that redeemed the rest of the piece.

San Diego Early Music Society brings the young, acclaimed German male vocal ensemble Amarcord to St. James Episcopal Church on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012.

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