No "brown-rice Baroque" on this Seattle Symphony program

"I don't believe in brown-rice Baroque," says Nicholas McGegan, an early-music specialist more concerned with making wonderful music than in strict allegiance to period arrangements.

McGegan, speaking by phone from his adopted city of San Francisco, will lead a pared-down Seattle Symphony Orchestra this weekend in a program dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach, two of the latter's contemporaries and the second of his five sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

McGegan has conducted the Seattle orchestra several times before.

A British flutist, harpsichordist and conductor educated at Oxford and Cambridge, McGegan has been Music Director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in Berkeley, Calif., since 1985. Now a globe-trotting expert in composition and instrumentation of 17th-to-mid-18th-century music, he was very much a part of his native England's early-music explosion in the 1970s and early '80s.

"It was very exciting," McGegan says of the then-feverish drive to record and perform, using period instruments, from the repertoires of 18th- and even 19th-century composers including Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.

"It was a very different world," he says. "Orchestras were attached to record companies — that's collapsed now. There was more recording than performing. That changed in the late 1970s and early '80s. People wanted to hear music live on early instruments. I'm not sure if those performances would pass muster today, but there was a sense of pioneering."

Yet McGegan has never been a purist about so-called historically-informed performance, maintaining what he describes on his Web site as an arm's-length relationship with early-music "tastemakers."

While he also conducts music from the Renaissance, Classical and Romantic periods — and has collaborated with Mark Morris on a number of dance projects — McGegan's reputation is that of a Baroque authority less interested in fidelity to period instruments than exploring possibilities in interpretation.

Most of his time, for instance, is spent conducting orchestras playing contemporary instruments, even on such Baroque programs as the one in Benaroya Hall tonight and tomorrow night.

"There aren't a lot of adjustments," says McGegan. "A good orchestra is used to it. I bring my own music, marked up by me. There's no waste of the musicians' time, with me telling them why things should sound a certain way to be accurate. Conductors shouldn't preach. If I'm prepared, we can concentrate on making music."

Among the tools McGegan has brought with him is a photocopy of an unpublished score for a suite from Jean-Marie Leclair's only full-length opera, "Scylla et Glaucus."

"I'm fond of the Leclair," says McGegan. "The suite is a 'Reader's Digest' version of it."

The show, McGegan says, evolved in its concept.

"The program has been through some moves," he says. "Originally it was about fathers and children: Bach and sons, Mozart's father and Mozart. It ended up a Baroque show with music all from a 30-year period."

McGegan is thrilled that internationally-renowned violinist Ani Kavafian will play with the orchestra for all four pieces on the bill, soloing on Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni's Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major.

J.S. Bach's Suite No.1 in C Major and C.P.E. Bach's Symphony in E major round out the bill.

"The C.P.E. Bach is weird," McGegan says. "The music is expressive, with lots of stops and starts. It's unnerving, going in strange directions. It's really Baroque on the edge of Rococo — lots of experimenting, and quite hard to play."

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com