The ensemble played with lithe tempos and lean textures, beautifully balancing cool refinement and intense expressivity.
But for Mr. Koopman, proper style in Handel has to do with more than lean textures and speed.
Though he comes from the early-music world, his performances are not necessarily characterized by the lean textures and fleet tempos we associate with that movement.
Although Brahms was hardly unknown territory for Bernstein, the composer's scores never occupied the Olympian ground he reserved for Beethoven, there favoring speed and lean textures but also majesty.
Some, including me, would say better, with a rounder flavor, leaner texture and sweeter fat.
The leaner textures give many fascinating insights into the works' structures.
Even so, with ears retuned by John Eliot Gardiner's revelatory Beethoven with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique at Carnegie Hall the night before, it was hard not to miss the leaner textures and more variegated timbres a period-instrument ensemble can bring out in music of the Classical period.
It invigorates the leaner textures of those pieces as much as it does the denser ones of works including Storm, a five-movement-setting of words from The Tempest, and the Missa del Cid – not really a mass at all, but a quirky, partly narrated account of a swashbuckling 11th-century Spanish hero defeating the Moorish forces.
Occasionally the sound seemed a bit too fulsome; there were a few passages when leaner textures might have paid dividends, but otherwise it was a very rewarding tour around corners of the repertoire that don't get visited as often as they might.
There followed a period during which he was strongly influenced by Igor Stravinsky's Neoclassicism, turning toward an abstract style he described as "more spare in sonority, more lean in texture".
The choice of a lean orchestral texture (just two violins, cello and organ for most of the movements), the possibility of a narrative structure rejected in favour of a reflective, almost hypnotic sequence of movements, seems a million miles away from the theatricality and virtuosic orchestrations of Bach's passions.
