L'Arpeggiata in "La Tarantella" at Zankel Hall The tarantella, according to timeworn southern Italian tradition, is a folk-dance style with a mission. According to some sources, the conventional form of the dance is named for Taranto, the coastal city in Apulia where it took hold. A more colorful explanation, widely accepted in the 16th and 17th centuries, held that the dance's accelerating triple-time whirl helped to sweat out the effects of tarantism: a delirious condition caused by the bite of an indigenous wolf spider, the tarantula. The truth is probably more complicated; some authorities view the tarantella as the re-emergence of a celebratory style taken to Italy by pagan Greeks and subsequently stifled by the Roman Senate. Understandably its irresistible rhythms, potent lyrical strains and footloose steps proved impossible to vanquish. On the evidence provided on Friday evening at Zankel Hall by L'Arpeggiata, the pan-European early-music ensemble, during the third concert of its Carnegie Hall residency, no one in his or her right mind would want to do so. The program, "La Tarantella: Antidotum Tarantulae," incorporated regional variants, scholarly settings, improvisations and contemporary songs in a seamless 90-minute survey. On a 2001 CD of the same title, Christina Pluhar, L'Arpeggiata's artistic director and theorbo player, used 10 instrumentalists. Here a lean septet combined precision and poise with the intuitive flexibility of a jazz combo. That latter character was explicit when the cornetto player Doron Sherwin played a fiery solo over Boris Schmidt's limber walking bass and a syncopated shuffle played with brushes by the percussionist David Mayoral. More than once Ms. Pluhar, Mr. Sherwin, Mr. Mayoral and the guitarist Marcello Vitale fused in seamless grooves reminiscent of nothing so much as those of Count Basie's signature rhythm section. Where the disc featured three vocalists, the concert relied on just one: Lucilla Galeazzi, a singer of penetrating tone, pinpoint control and ready access to that bottomless pool of expressivity reserved for the greatest divas. In the traditional "Pizzicarella Mia" and her own "Ah, Vita Bella!" Ms. Galeazzi's buoyant air was infectious; in "Lu Povero "Ntonuccio," a somber tale of a child's death, her racked cries chilled to the bone. But if much of the music was suited to the intimacy of the Village Vanguard or Café Carlyle, those rooms would not have provided space for the dancer Anna Dego, whose muscular stomps, akimbo spins and exhausted collapses aptly conveyed the tarantella's delirious spirit. In an encore rendition of "Pizzicarella Mia," Ms. Dego plucked a partner from the audience. Surrendering to the moment fearlessly and with no little agility, Itai Leibowitz, 31, emerged uninjured and beaming.