Manze first made a splash on the early music scene as a specialist in the hairier nooks of the 17th century Baroque — Biber, Pandolfi, Marini, and the like. In recent years, however, he has spent more and more time in the 18th century, first in Bach and Vivaldi and now in even later music. On Sunday, he was in town with the London-based "period" band he has led since 2003. They are a small, immensely disciplined crew, playing with double woodwinds and strings. Bay Area early music aficionados would have recognized a couple of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra regulars onstage: cellist Phoebe Carrai and oboist Gonzalo Ruiz (sounding golden as first oboist throughout).

The concert opened with a kind of musical bomb disguised as a Sinfonia in F Major by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Wq. 183/3), wild stuff even by C.P.E. standards. The opening's disjointed gestures, striking enough on their own, give only the slightest hint of what is in store later, as the musical train rushes from one near-derailment to the next. The big smash comes just as the first movement seems finally within sight of home, only to miss the tonic altogether and ram full tilt into a completely unexpected pitch. The subsequent slow-motion chromatic mayhem works its way by painful degrees eventually to the relative minor. Once there, Bach — evidently struggling to come up with a conceit more bizarre than what has already transpired — awards the slow movement's theme to the viola section.

And so it goes, onward to a breakneck finale that tries and nearly succeeds in outdoing the first movement in harmonic audacity. Throw in a good dash of C.P.E.'s characteristic motivic fidgitry, and a rumbustious use of the considerable wind complement that would have made Rameau proud, and you have a piece almost deliriously crammed with color and incident.

It was a heady experience, yes, but would all that verve and color transfer well to Mozart? Expectations were raised by Manze's spoken introduction to the G-Major Violin Concerto (K. 216), next on the program. He talked about the operatic experience that the still-teenage composer had drawn on in the violin concertos, the new sense of the soloist as a dramatic protagonist interacting with the orchestra rather than merely trading material with it. It was an illuminating take on the concertos and eloquently put. (The audience, which applauded as Manze set the mike down, clearly thought so, too.) And it was played out in the minutest detail in the performance that followed.

Occasionally, I've been uncomfortable with Manze's approach to music that is less amenable to wild interpretation than his favorite haunts of the 17th century. Like a few other notable denizens of that repertory, he has sometimes seemed at a loss for an interpretive path. He resorts to pulling the music about or to ornamenting it in jarring ways, or (worse) to merely "playing it straight." Here, though, he seemed joyously back in his element. The key was the relationship with the orchestra he'd just spoken of.

Manze was a constant and consummate tease. He insinuated, he cajoled, he issued snappy comebacks, he sang, and he whispered. And the entire time, the orchestra was "right back at him" with a level of intimate banter that I don't think I've ever heard from an orchestra. Most of the time the tone was light, but when it turned dark momentarily, it registered. That strange, ticking orchestral music that starts the first-movement development, for example, had brief but genuine menace in it. Manze picked his way across it like an operatic protagonist encountering some unexpected peril.

The slow movement was gloriously hushed. The orchestra's muted colors were ravishing and Manze's solo line was lovely and clear. And the finale was a hoot, especially when Manze barrelled in with the "Strassburger" contredanse tune in a wickedly broad parody of a peasant fiddler. Once or twice in this movement I thought he was taking a little too much rhythmic license for the music's good. He stretched some of his exchanges with the orchestra to the point where the meter had trouble snapping back into place afterward. But the fun and the constant interest of the musicmaking carried everything.

The cadenzas and Eingänge ("lead-ins"), by the way, were nearly ideal, not overextended and convincingly improvised-sounding. Yet I wonder if their daringly quiet dynamics were wise in so large a space as Zellerbach.

Before the Adagio, Manze asked the audience to regard it as an encore-in-advance, because of the greatness of the symphony following on the program. To paraphrase: "Usually you ask for something you want after the end of the concert. So here we're giving you something you didn't ask for before the end of the concert, and if you ask for anything afterward, we won't give it to you." It was charmingly put and also brilliant, musically speaking. I wish more performers who end a concert with a subtle masterwork like the great G-Minor Symphony (K. 550) would do the same.

There was also no routine in the articulation, no standardization to historical "practice." (Some of the articulation, indeed, would strike most "modern" players as egregiously legato, such as the extremely smooth eighth notes at the beginning of the slow movement, or the unison high D pickups in the finale's theme.) The rhythmic flexibility Manze and his band allowed themselves was remarkable in seeming so natural. Climactic moments seemed to stretch out of physical effort in the big cadences in the slow movement, or out of mental bewilderment, as in the celebrated "twelve-tone" spot in the finale. It was Mozart as high drama, Mozart deminiaturized.

We have been seeing Mozart from faraway a lot this anniversary year. Thanks to the English Concert, listeners enjoyed an upclose look at the sometimes-scary real thing.