The program started off with a short and pleasing Sinfonia in D Major by Antonio Brioschi, a prolific composer of early symphonies, which became popular all over Europe in the second quarter of the 18th century. The first movement, in abbreviated sonata form, veered toward the minor in its second section before a varied reprise of the opening. In the second movement, the ingratiating triple-time melodies of the opening were punctuated by strident descending unison arpeggios. The lively finale brought Biondi’s virtuosity to the fore, supported by adroit playing by the continuo group.

In the Vivaldi violin concerto that followed (no. 3 in L’Estro Armonico), Biondi had a double function to fill as soloist and leader of the ensemble, turning his back to the audience to give the down bow for each movement and again to coordinate its close. It’s worth noting that the Europa Galante violinists and violists play standing up, which may be closer to 18th-century ensemble practice than the more recent tradition of sitting. Not only did it seem to lead to a particularly energetic and coordinated style of playing, but it also allowed Biondi to move seamlessly between his roles as virtuoso soloist executing flights of passage work and leader of the ensemble in tutti sections.

Angelo Maria Scaccia was the son of a violinist and a member of the ducal orchestra in the 1750s. His Violin Concerto in E-flat Major featured solo passages employing double stops in the first movement and a highly ornamented aria for solo violin and ensemble in the second. The third movement included a short cadenza and a surprising pianissimo ending.

Haydn’s Concerto for Violin and Harpsichord is an early work, composed before he joined the Esterhàzy household in 1766. Continuo player Paola Poncet switched roles to join Fabio Bioni as soloist, while continuing to support the orchestra in tutti sections. The two soloists were heard both separately and together, vying in virtuosity and joining in double cadenzas near the end of both the first and the second movement. In the Presto Finale, Haydn’s toying with offbeat rhythms ended in a battle of wits between the two soloists.

After the intermission we were treated to a stellar performance of an old favorite, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor in which Biondi was joined by the ensemble’s principal second violinist, Andrea Rognoni. Taking the first movement at a brisk tempo, the well-matched pair brought out its fugal intricacies while maintaining a clear sense of the overall architecture, no mean feat. In the second movement, the exquisitely interweaving aria-duet in siciliano rhythm was set off sharply against brusque chordal passages with drone accompaniment. Tasteful variations ornamented the da capo repetition of the opening. In the Finale, the two soloists sounded as one in chordal accents over a lively walking bass, concluding one of the most satisfying performances of this concerto heard in a long time.

A suite of instrumental pieces from Handel’s early opera Roderigo concluded the program. Predictably, it opened with an Overture in the French manner, with slow, dotted-rhythm, duple-time opening and concluding sections enclosing a faster triple-time fugue. In the dance movements that followed, Biondi and his ensemble had a chance to show off their stylistic mastery of the French manner. A lively Gigue and a slower Sarabande in “walking” tempo, played by the smaller concertino group of two violins, viola, and continuo, were followed by a toe-tapping Matelot (the French equivalent of a Hornpipe) for full orchestra. The next group consisted of two minuets for the concertino group enclosing an energetic Bourrée for full orchestra. In the final Passacaille, the recurrent refrain over a ground bass alternated with virtuosic solo couplets for the violin in dialogue with other instruments.

As an encore, Biondi announced “a little surprise:” the fast and furious storm Allegro movement from Vivaldi’s Winter concerto from the Four Seasons. In a tour de force of ensemble and solo playing, this was presented as a programmatic character piece, its chromatically descending harmonies as threatening as could be.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The program opened with Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in C Major, op. 6, no. 10. Published in Amsterdam a year after the composer’s death in 1713, and much admired for their melodic clarity and tonal consistency. The twelve concertos of Opus 6 remained current well into the 19th century. According to conductor Martin Pearlman, who supplied introductory remarks in lieu of program notes, the concertos were so popular in England that on one occasion all 12 were performed at a single sitting and, thanks to overwhelming audience response, repeated on the spot. For this performance, Boston Baroque’s band consisted of 15 accomplished string players (no less than 13 of them women), with harpsichordist Peter Sykes providing continuo support. The three principals, violinists Christina Day Martinson and Julie Leven, violinists, and Sarah Freiberg, cellist, served as concertinists in the “solo” sections, providing dynamic contrast to the full complement of ripieno players. Pearlman conducted with characteristic verve and stylistic sensitivity. He took the opening Andante in a sprightly walking tempo and the Allemanda in a faster duple time, and brought out inherent rhythmic subtleties in the triple-time Corrente and Menuetto.

Published (in 1738) as one of six organ concertos, Opus 4, Handel’s Harp Concerto in B-flat Major was originally composed as an interlude for his setting, first performed in February, 1736, of Dryden’s ode Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music. The concerto represents metaphorically the scene in which the musician Timotheus, Orpheus-like, plays his lyre for Alexander the Great at a banquet, arousing various moods in the ruler and finally succeeding in inciting him to burn the city of Persepolis in revenge for his dead Greek soldiers. Moderns harps have pedals that can quickly retune certain strings in order to produce chromatic notes. The “triple harp” of Handel’s time has three rows of strings, the two outer rows for the notes of the diatonic scale, with the inner third row providing chromatic pitches. Often sounding alone, the harp was played by soloist Barbara Poeschl-Edrich with beautiful clarity of articulation and phrasing. In order not to overwhelm its delicate sound, Handel’s accompaniment often called for pizzicato in the lower strings, with bowing only in the violins. The Larghetto second movement evoked the mood of a pastoral lament from one of Handel’s operas, its melody doubled in thirds and punctuated by tutti chords from the orchestra, while the vigorous Allegro Finale was presumably intended to depict Alexander’s more warlike frame of mind.

In the Bach Double Concerto in D Minor, concertmaster Christina Day Martinson was joined by Julie Leven, principal second violin. Both are accomplished players, but Martinson’s playing was more forward and soloistically projected, while Leven tended to remain in the background. One missed the sense of friendly rivalry — each soloist striving to outdo the other — essential to the character of this piece. The second movement, with its sinuously intertwining melodies, brought out the best in both soloists, while the Finale was a shade too fast. The melodies hurtled over one another, obscuring details of articulation in the process.

After the intermission we were entertained by two spectacularly virtuosic works by Vivaldi. Aldo Abreu was the soloist in the Concerto in A Minor for sopranino recorder and orchestra, one of the many works composed for the talented girls of the famous Ospedale di Pietà orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi taught for many years. Abreu showed himself to be a master of this tiny instrument, which sounds an octave higher than written — more or less in the range of a modern piccolo. His adroit phrasing and skillful ornamentation were nothing short of amazing in fast passage work, while superb breath control allowed him to sustain extended melodic arabesques in the aria-like Larghetto. The Finale, working up to a climactic crescendo at breathtaking speed, brought down the house.

Mary Wilson was the soloist in Vivaldi’s motet Nulla n mundo pax sincera, really a cantata consisting of two da capo arias in contrasting meter framing a recitative, the whole rounded off by a concluding Alleluia. In his introductory remarks, Pearlman speculated that this piece might have been composed for a talented alumna of the Pietà conservatory. Wilson’s light, clear voice and surefire technique were more than a match for the motet, which rivals a violin concerto in its virtuosic demands. Beginning the opening aria, with its lilting siciliano rhythms, in fairly restrained tones, her voice took on more warmth and a deeper resonance in the da capo repetition, thanks to expressive ornamentation and a judicious addition of vibrato. Arioso-like flights of melisma brought the recitative to an emotional peak, while the summit of virtuosity was reached in the final aria in fast duple time and the breathtaking roulades of the Alleluia.

This being New Year’s Eve, Wilson and Pearlman presented us with a surprise encore: the “first and only” performance by a Baroque ensemble of the set piece “Glitter and Be Gay” from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. An experienced opera singer and comedienne, Wilson played this brilliant piece, itself a witty pastiche of operatic cliches, to the hilt in a rousing finale to a wonderful evening.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Outside the “Euro zone” although connected by many links to the continent, English music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance developed many idiosyncratic, and endearing, style traits. Fullness of sound and a fondness for “sweet” harmonies based on thirds and sixths as well as quirky false harmonic relations persisted even as the long, floating melodic lines of early Tudor polyphony gradually gave way to text-defining points of imitation, a continental import. Those of us lucky enough to have heard Blue Heron’s stellar “Christmas in Medieval England” the night before (a program presented December 16th and 17th in the First Church, Cambridge and reviewed for BMI by Tamar Hestrin-Grader here) were treated first to a grand sweep through English sacred music from the thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, and then from the mid-sixteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century.

Life under the Tudor monarchs was complicated for composers of sacred music as they navigated the violent fluctuations in musical practice from Henry VIII’s break with Rome and suppression of the monasteries to the stripping of the altars under Edward VI, Catholic restoration under Mary Tudor, and finally the establishment of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth I. Although the Catholic composers Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505-1585) and William Byrd (ca. 1540-1623) wrote music for Anglican as well as Catholic services, all the music we heard last night was composed for the Roman Catholic rite. The program opened, like Blue Heron’s, with the singing of the familiar hymn for Advent, Veni, veni Emmanuel. Alternate hymn stanzas were sung by men and women placed in opposite transepts of the church, the last two stanzas harmonized in simple note-against-note organum that lent additional solemnity to the haunting plainchant melody.

Thomas Tallis served in the royal households of all four Tudor monarchs, composing service music in both Latin and English. The text of his six-voice motet Videte miraculum, a responsory for the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin on February 2nd, tells the story of the Virgin birth. Placed in the tenor as a cantus firmus in equal long notes, the plainchant melody is surrounded by five other voices in complex polyphony, whose linear thrust often results in uncompromising cross relations at cadences. Tallis’s incomplete seven-voice Missa Puer natus es is based on the Christmas Introit, which we heard in its original plainchant form later in the program. Here Tallis employed an elaborate cantus firmus technique that harks back to Medieval numerology: the value of each note of the borrowed chant melody is based on the number assigned to its vowel in the original text. Only the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei of the Mass survive. Tallis — and the Stile Antico singers — made the most of the implicit contrast between sections of the Gloria text, from the vigorous opening song of praise to the more reflective “Qui tollis peccata mundi” and the triumphant “Quoniam tu solus sanctus” with its closely-spaced imitations on the word “altissimus.” In the Sanctus, the climactic moment came in the recurrent “Osanna in excelsis” section, its static harmonies animated by complex contrapuntal interchange among the voices, a technique employed again in the “Dona nobis pacem” that concluded the Agnus Dei.

The movements of the Tallis Mass were interspersed with four settings of Propers (seasonal liturgical texts) by William Byrd for the Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary during Advent. In his late years Byrd, a recusant, and his family joined a Catholic community in Essex. By 1605, when his first book of Gradualia (Propers for the major feasts of the church year) was published, he no longer tried to conceal either its authorship or its liturgical purpose. Intended for devotions in the private chapels of aristocratic recusants, these short four-voice motets are modest in scale yet full of text-inspired motives in skillfully handled imitative entries. Byrd’s contemporary Robert White (ca. 1538-1574) served as Master of the Choristers at Ely and Chester cathedrals and then at Westminster Abbey. His Magnificat for six voices is set alternatim, that is, with plainchant and choral verses in alternation. This expansive work is notable for its long-breathed melodic lines and ingenious variety of contrapuntal textures, such as the pairing of upper-voice quartet and bass on “Esurientes implevit bonis” and the duet for alto and bass that opens “Sicut erat in principio.”

As the second half of the program opened, four female voices rang out from the rear gallery with the evocative text of Audi vocem de caelo by John Taverner (ca. 1490-1545), most of whose music was composed before the Reformation. Whether in the closely-spaced polyphony of the respond with its soaring contrapuntal lines, or in the plainchant verse, the women sounded for all the world like (ideal) boy choristers, their voices perfectly tuned, ringingly clear, and without vibrato. Most of the Latin sacred music by John Sheppard (ca. 1515-1559 or 1560) was composed during the reign of Mary Tudor. His six-voice responsory for Christmas Matins, Verbum caro factum est, with its extravagantly wide range and florid ornamental lines, brought a fitting conclusion to this magnificent program. By way of contrast, and in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, Tomás Luis de Victoria’s four-voice Christmas motet was offered as an encore.

Stile Antico stands out for clarity of phrasing, precisely unified ensemble, and for sheer beauty of sound that is strong and clear but never sounds forced. Their program booklet featured complete texts and translations along with two pages of concise and informative notes by Matthew O’Donovan that were a model of how to write for informed but not necessarily specialist listeners — all presented in a clearly readable typeface. Members of the choir also stepped out occasionally to deliver further introductory remarks. Under the title Puer natus est, the program was issued on CD last year by Harmonia Mundi. But nothing can replace the pure pleasure of hearing this talented ensemble live in a beautiful space such as St. Paul Church.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

In Spain, devotional texts were often set as villancicos, refrain songs in the vernacular that had their secular origin in medieval dance tunes. Spiced with  elements of local Indian or African-American dialects and rhythms in the colonies, villancicos were performed  before mass on special feast days or even inserted into the liturgy itself. In the lighthearted song that opened Friday’s program, a recurrent refrain “Attención! Silencio!” invited believers to celebrate of the birth of the Christ Child. Shannon Canavin’s light and flexible soprano was paired with Shari Alise Wilson’s somewhat darker yet equally agile voice, the continuo accompaniment ably provided by Andrus Madsen, chamber organ, and Emily Walhout, Baroque cello. The Spanish-born composer of this piece, Antonio Durán de la Mota (ca. 1672-1736), worked in the silver-rich mountain town of Potosi in Bolivia. Domenico Zipoli 1688-1726), born and trained  in Italy, served as a missionary in the Indian villages established by the Jesuits in Paraguay. His Latin hymn, Jesu, corona Virginum, consisted of solo verses for soprano (Shannon Canavin) and alto (sung by countertenor Martin Near); in the final stanza, the two were joined by tenor Michael Barrett.

In a charming villancico by the Mexican composer Antonio de Salazar (1650-ca. 1715), Anthony the Moor proposes to celebrate the birth of Jesus by dancing a “Puerto Rico” and a “Cameroun.” Pizzicato cello imitated the sound of his bells and tambourine, the percussive plucking a foil for the flowing lines of the vocal duet sung by Wilson and Near. The anonymous Latin hymn Volate angeli was found in the archive of Chiquitos in eastern Bolivia. Here stanzas for two sopranos in dialogue were interspersed with instrumental ritornellos for violin (Katherine Winterstein), cello, and harp. Nancy Hurrell played a copy of a 1704 Spanish arpa de dos órdenes, a wonderfully sonorous instrument with 47 strings in two rows, which provided percussive articulation to the ensemble. In Los que fueren de buen gusto (All those who have good taste), by the Mexican composer Francisco de Vidales (ca. 1630-1702), three singers (Canavin, Wilson, and Near) told the story of the nativity in the style of a rustic xácara dance in wildly syncopated rhythms. Bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton joined the ensemble in the joyous carol — accompanied only by the ringing tones of the harp — by the Franciscan friar Gerónimo Gonzales that concluded the first half of the program.

After the intermission it was time for a complete change of style and texture in a group of late Renaissance motets sung a cappella. Pedro Bermúdez (ca. 1558-1605?) was born in Granada but, after a rocky career in Spain, spent the last years of his life in the New World. In his four-voice motet Christus natus est nobis (Christ is born for us) Canavin, Near, Barrett, and Tipton joined in a beautifully balanced ensemble. The two works by Victoria,  the dean of Spanish polyphonists, brought further  textural contrast. The hymn Christe Redemptor omnium (O Christ, redeemer of all people) was set alternatim style: the odd-numbered verses intoned by Canavin in unaccompanied Gregorian chant, and the even-numbered verses set in elaborate polyphony for varying combinations of three or four voices. All five singers participated in Victoria’s Gaude Maria virgo (Rejoice, Virgin Mary), the two sopranos carrying a sustained canon at the unison against the more active lower parts.

The three final numbers returned to a more popular style. The anonymous carol Tierno Infante divino (Tender divine child), was a strophic song for two sopranos with instrumental interludes, its graceful melodic lines echoed from one voice to the other. Roque Ceruti (ca. 1686-1760) was born in Milan but served for more than 50 years in cathedrals in Peru. His xácara told the Christmas story in a lively strophic song for two sopranos, two violins (Winterstein and Emily Dahl) and continuo. Ceruti’s Hoy la tierra produce una rosa (Today the earth produces a rose) concluded the evening on a joyful note.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Violinist Yura Lee joined violist Marcus Thompson, artistic director of the Chamber Music Society, and cellist Astrid Schween in the Serenade in C major for String Trio, op. 10, by Ernö Dohnányi (1877-1960; grandfather of the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi).  Dohnányi’s career as pianist, teacher, and conductor began in Hungary, where he championed the music of Bartók and Kodály, and ended in the United States. Composed in 1902, his five-movement Serenade evokes similarly lighthearted music from the Classical era, combining echoes of Brahms with his own brand of lyricism. A Hungarian-tinged melody, worked out contrapuntally, appears as an interlude in the opening Marcia. In the Romanza, the viola opens with a beautiful Adagio melody against pizzicato violin and cello, followed by a soaring melody in the violin. The Scherzo features a perpetuum mobile theme with contrasting Trio, and the Andante Tema con variazione a chromatically-tinged theme most poignant in its Adagio incarnation. The final movement, a Rondo, adds a rustic touch to one of its interludes with a Hungarian melody over drone fifths in the cello.

Ernest Bloch’s Two Pieces for String Quartet were composed twelve years apart. The Andante moderato, from 1938, with its dark harmonies, has a neo-romantic cast. The second piece, Allegro molto, composed in 1950, contrasts dissonant gestures and brusque, aggressive rhythms with a lyrical interlude and concluding reminiscences of the Andante. Lucy Chapman joined the members of the string trio as first violinist in this engaging performance.

Hodgkinson returned to the stage, and Chapman and Lee exchanged places in the final offering, Schumann’s popular Piano Quintet in E-flat major, op. 44. Players of the rousing Allegro brillante all too often thump their way through this movement with its multiplicity of energetic themes. It was gratifying to hear sensitive ensemble playing — give and take among the players — taking precedence over romantic excess. Steady tempo throughout the second movement prevented the funeral march from lapsing into pathos as it faded away. The brilliant Scherzo gave all members of the ensemble plenty to do, with rapid scales in the opening section, distant bells sounding in the first Trio, and echoes of Schubert in the second. Attention to details of texture and articulation held our interest throughout the lengthy Finale, Allegro ma non troppo, culminating in a return of the first movement’s opening theme in a fugato apotheosis.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The program opened with Franz Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat, D471. It was composed in 1816 when Schubert was 19, working as a school assistant but already producing operas, Masses, and numerous lieder as well as symphonies and string quartets. In the midst of all this activity, the trio remained a fragment, abandoned after only the opening Allegro and thirty-nine measures of a second movement were completed. The four movements of a second String Trio, D581, also in B-flat, were composed a year later. Schubert’s early instrumental works were composed for performance by his family and friends. Apparently they also enjoyed playing Joseph Haydn’s trios for violin, viola, and baryton (a now rare form of viol). Certainly there was a distinctly Haydnesque flavor to the lively Allegro of D471, although the development section already showed Schubert’s propensity for extended modulations. The Chameleon players (Joanna Kurkowicz, violin; Scott Woolweaver, viola, and Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello) wisely chose to honor the repeats indicated for both sections (exposition and development plus recapitulation) of the movement, giving us the chance to savor the brief movement in full.

An entirely different ensemble took the stage for Francis Poulenc’s popular Sextuor for piano and wind quintet, composed between 1932 and 1939. Pianist Vivian Chang-Freiheit was joined by Deborah Boldin, flute; Nancy Dimock, oboe; Gary Gorczyca, clarinet; Margaret Phillips, bassoon; and Whitacre Hill, French horn. The first movement, Allegro vivace, opens in jazzy café-concert style; a lyrical interlude features duets and trios for various instruments, followed by a concluding “perpetuum mobile” march. In the second movement, the instruments enter one by one, then join in a lighthearted march. The Finale opened with a sharp burst of sound from all five winds, concluding with sonorous chords. Poulenc well understood the surprising affinity of piano and wind timbres, displayed at their best by this virtuoso ensemble.

Libby Larsen’s Corker for clarinet and percussion was another tour de force, pairing clarinetist Gary Gorczyca in witty dialogue with Mike Williams’s one-man percussion band (drum set, marimba, and xylophone). In fact, the piece is a set of compound dialogues: the contrasting upper and lower registers of the clarinet converse with one another, their melodies punctuated by drums or eerily echoed by marimba or xylophone. In the second section of the piece, the percussion took the lead in a lively  exchange of rhythmic motives. Larsen, who acknowledges the idioms of American vernacular music as her inspiration, writes with an appealing and forthright voice that cannot help but please.

After the intermission we entered a totally different stylistic world with Brahms’s densely romantic piano Quartet in A major, op. 26. Gloria Chien was the pianist, with violinist Joanna Kurkowicz, violist Scott Woolweaver, and cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer. Eloquent in many details, the performance was generally convincing, particularly in the second movement, Poco adagio, with its long-breathed melodies and foreboding cello ostinati. In the opening Allegro non troppo, however, a more coordinated flexibility in phrasing and articulation would have helped bring clarity to the complexities of conflicting duple and triple rhythms.

Chameleon is certainly to be commended for its innovative programming: little-known Schubert, less-known Brahms, a popular and tuneful work by Poulenc, and a showpiece for clarinet and percussion in an American idiom — all added up to a refreshingly out-of-the-ordinary mix.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Following without pause,  “Agitato da fiere tempeste” (Shaken by fierce tempests), an aria from Handel’s Oreste, continued in the same bravura vein. Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky proved himself more than a match for the virtuoso roulades and precarious leaps composed to show off the skills of the great castrato Giovanni Carestini, star of the 1734 Covent Garden performance. The next aria, from Handel’s wedding serenade Parnasso in Festa (1734), brought a complete change of mood. After a “pathetic” accompanied recitative, the aria — a slow siciliano — was a vehicle for Jaroussky’s astonishing range of vocal tone colors. Almost miraculously, the da capo return of the opening melody began softly as if from a distance, concluding with leisurely variations that demonstrated the singer’s mastery of late baroque performance style. Violinists Olivier Brault and Johanna Novom were the soloists in a spirited rendition of Vivaldi’s double concerto in A minor (familiar as an organ concerto in J. S. Bach’s arrangement). Their transparent and relaxed playing in the Larghetto was especially winning. Two more Handel arias completed the first half of the program: the lament in pastoral mode that opens Imeneo (1740), full of delicate musical imagery representing sighs and ocean waves, and “Con l’ali di constanza/Alza il suo volo Amor” (Love takes its flight/On the wings of constancy) from Ariodante (1735). Inspired by the optimistic text, Handel takes the singer through dazzling flights of melody, which Jaroussky executed at breakneck speed with flawless accuracy and breath control.

After a harpsichord prelude and an orchestral Chaconne by Handel, Vivaldi held center stage with three operatic arias. Although the native Italian could not match the German-born composer’s sensitivity to the nuances of text articulation,Vivaldi’s arias certainly rivalled Handel’s in richness of melodic invention. “Se mai senti spirarti sul volto” (If you ever feel wafting around your face the breath of a gentle breeze), a text by the prolific librettist Metastasio, compares breezes to sighs in a typical pastoral conceit, the violins and voice trading motives in exquisite ensemble. After a contrasting middle section in agitated minor mode, Jaroussky sang the da capo repeat sotto voce, concluding with a suitably restrained cadenza. The second aria, featuring more sighs and suffering, was accompanied throughout by pizzicato strings in contrast to the beautifully shaped melisma of the vocal line. Between these two rather subdued arias, we were treated to a rousing version of Vivaldi’s La Follia variations over a ground bass, arranged by Sorrell as a concerto grosso and interpreted by the ensemble as a mad dance accelerating to a truly frenzied climax. The final aria depicted a protagonist rescued from storms at sea, and here the textual imagery was matched by bravura roulades at top speed. The seemingly tireless Jaroussky obliged with no less than three encores, including an aria composed for the castrato Farinelli by the Neapolitan composer Nicola Porpora, and Handel’s famous “Ombra mai fu” from Serse.

With a background in violin and piano, Jaroussky combines superior musicianship and an unerring sense of style with a superb vocal instrument, a winning combination to showcase this demanding repertory. Once dismissed as unperformable, arias and complete operas by Handel and other Baroque composers have been successfully revived in recent years. Their heroic castrato parts, formerly transposed downward, are now sung in their proper range either by female singers or by male singers with extended and well-trained falsetto capabilities. At their best, these countertenors and sopranists would seem to approach or even match the strength and agility of the legendary castrato singers for whom so much extraordinary music was composed.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The Roman, in rhymed octosyllabic couplets in Old French, exists in a shorter and a longer version, but only one manuscript, now in the French National Library in Paris, survives of the longer version containing musical and literary interpolations. The musical numbers range from short bits of chant and pseudo-chant (in Latin) to extended unaccompanied songs and polyphonic motets in both French and Latin. In addition, wonderfully vivid illustrations, particularly of the wedding feast of Fauvel and Vain Glory with the accompanying charivari and Tournament of the Virtues and Vices, are the glory of this large book.

Much of the satire and allegory in this longer version of the Roman refer to the rise and fall of the king’s chamberlain, Enguerran de Marigny. After the death of Philip IV in 1314, Marigny was accused of financial mismanagement, then necromancy, convicted, and finally hanged in April 1315. Other political events are mentioned, such as the suppression of the Templars on charges of sexual and religious transgressions and charges of adultery against the daughters-in-law of Philip IV.  The musical interpolations also include motets on the broader theme of admonition to royalty.

Some years ago, the Boston Camerata’s founder and then director Joel Cohen and several French collaborators made a performing version of the Roman and produced a video that was shown on French TV and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Last year the Camerata updated the production with the addition of manuscript illuminations to be projected in coordination with the music and the texts. As speaker, Cohen juxtaposed short excerpts from the French text with a witty -— and cleverly rhymed — English translation that provided narrative continuity. Musical selections from Book I of the two-part Roman comment on the fickleness of Fortune and the despicable behavior of Fauvel, advise listeners to stay away from taverns, and admonish the young king Louis X to follow the example of his saintly namesake. The second part of the narrative depicts Fauvel’s failed courtship of Fortune, who awards him Vain Glory as a bride. The third part reaches its climax with the marriage of Fauvel and the upending of social norms. Finally, the people pray to the Virgin for deliverance from Fauvel’s crimes.

The cast of Wednesday’s performance included five participants from the Camerata’s 1995 CD of the Roman: soprano (and Artistic Director) Anne Azéma in the role of Fortune; Joel Cohen as narrator, luthenist, and percussionist; Michael Collver, countertenor, as Fauvel, who also played the cornetto, along with Steven Lundahl, sackbut, slide trumpet, and recorders; and Shira Kammen, fiddle, rebec, and harp. They were joined by tenor Michael Barrett impersonating a female Vain Glory. All three singers showed an unfailing sense of style along with incisive diction and clear intonation, and all three gamely participated in a bit of broad miming as required. The instruments provided color and variety, and the charivari was truly terrifying. If, as Joel Cohen suggested in his program note, the theater of the original Fauvel was that of the mind rather than a public proscenium, the Camerata’s adaptation of the Roman allowed us to participate in its spirit, however vicariously, and to enjoy fine performances of some gems of Late Medieval poetry and music.

By way of a curtain raiser to the Roman de Fauvel, an assemblage of twelfth- and thirteenth-century songs and poems on animal topics under the heading Le Bestiaire d’Amour was performed by Azéma, with Shira Kammen on vielle and harp. A medieval bestiary was a compendium of beasts, real and mythical, that not only described their natural history but also their symbolic meaning within the Christian moral order. Recited excerpts from the twelfth-century bestiary of Philippe de Thaon described the mermaid and her seductive song, and a strange beast called a monosceros, with antlers on his head and the body of a goat. Moral lessons were drawn from the foolishness of a stag and a fox in fables by Marie de France, recited to vielle accompaniment and followed by an instrumental “Dance of the Fox.” A pastoral refrain song about a nightingale followed, sung to harp accompaniment. The thirteenth-century trouvère Thibaut de Champagne lamented that, like the unicorn, he would die in the lap of his lady. With her bright, clear voice and convincing diction, Azéma brought these texts and melodies to a new life beyond mere antiquarian curiosity.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Verses from the “Battle of the women of Florence” by the fourteenth-century poet Franco Sacchetti were sung alternately by sopranos Gloria Moretti and Marie Pierre Duceau to a tune identified as “traditional Tuscan.” A virtuosic elaboration of the formulaic melody was created by Moretti, whose expressive vibrato and vividly incisive delivery contrasted nicely with Duceau’s sweet-toned lyricism. Accompaniment was provided alternately by Francis Biggi on the cittern, a wire-strung plucked instrument, and Bettina Ruchti’s lira da braccio, a bowed-string instrument featuring a violin shape, flat bridge, and five strings plus two drone strings that was traditionally used to provide chordal accompaniment for sung or recited ottava rima poetry. Moretti was equally eloquent in elaborations of two more traditional Tuscan melodies, one of them sung to a sixteenth-century ottava based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the other to a latter-day ottava by a twentieth-century peasant, demonstrating the persistence of a popular Ovidian tradition in our own times.

Interspersed among these “creative reconstructions” of an unwritten repertory were selections from the written repertory of songs by fourteenth-century composers from Italian courts and monasteries that have survived in a small number of manuscripts. Precisely notated and intended for a sophisticated audience, these madrigals (stanzas of three lines followed by a concluding couplet) and ballatas (stanzas with a recurring refrain framing repeated couplets) were composed for one, two, or three parts, with no indication of any instrumental accompaniment. In Marie Pierre Duceau’s beautiful rendition of Francesco Landini’s madrigal Non a Narciso, the second, simpler voice part was played on the lute by Francis Biggi. The addition of a small drum, although skillfully played by Massimiliano Dragoni, seemed somehow intrusive and better suited to a dance than to this lyrical piece with its sinuously ornate melodic line. In Jacopo da Bologna’s madrigal Si chome al canto the two sopranos were reinforced, to my mind superfluously, by vielle (a medieval fiddle, played by Bettina Ruchti), winds (Avery Gosfield and Marco Ferrari), and tambourine. Jacopo’s Non al suo amante is the only contemporaneous musical setting of Petrarch’s poetry to have survived. Here the second voice was played on the vielle. Avery Gosfield, recorder, and Marco Ferrari, transverse flute, played an instrumental variation on the same piece, probably intended originally for a small organ, that appears in an early fifteenth-century Italian manuscript. The performance of an anonymous early two-voice madrigal, Pianze la bella iguana, by the two sopranos without accompaniment, was a delight, their voices complementing each other in perfect intonation. A three-voice ballata, performed by Duceau with Gosfield and Ferrari on tenor recorders offered a nice conceit in praise of part music: “No greater pain had Dido / Who killed herself for Aeneas / Than the pain of hearing melodies without polyphony.”

Only a few medieval dance tunes were written down, since instrumental players were often not literate, and at any rate, skilled at individual and collective improvisation and elaboration of well-known melodies. A medieval jam session involving all members of the ensemble brought the first half of the program to a rousing close with a “saltarello” (a leaping dance) played by vielle, cittern, bagpipes, pipe and tabor, triangle, and tambourine, and the next-to-last number, another saltarello, featured a colorful ensemble of soprano recorder, pan pipes, lute, vielle, and tambourine.

The program also included three examples of the “frottola,” a type of secular song cultivated extemporaneously toward the end of the fifteenth century at North Italian courts, and also collected in manuscript and printed editions. Poet-singers of these simple melodies often accompanied themselves on a lira da braccio or a lute; the lower parts could also be performed by singers. The text of Giovan Battista Zesso’s Ogni cosa ha el suo loco (Everything has its place / And returns to where it belongs) elaborates in traditional ottava rima form on the theme of perpetual change without progress, concluding the program on a suitably Ovidian note. All members of the ensemble took part, each providing a creatively ornamented version of the simple melodic and harmonic framework.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

For over 2000 years, Jewish and Christian scholars have attempted to interpret symbolically the erotic texts of the “Song of Songs.” According to the informative program note by François Filiatrault in the Festival program book, the poems, long attributed to King Solomon, are probably a fourth-century BCE compilation of Hebrew, Syrian, Egyptian, or Moabite songs that were sung at wedding ceremonies and feasts, and then included among the canonical Old Testament texts. Early in the Christian era, Jews began to consider the “Song of Songs” as an allegory representing reciprocal love between Yahweh and the Synagogue. Christians followed suit, reinterpreting the loving couple as Christ and his Church, and later equating the female lover metaphorically with the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, or simply the human soul. With the inclusion of passages from the “Song of Songs” in the liturgy for the feasts of the Virgin, and the intensified cult of the Virgin from the twelfth century on, composers chose to set these vividly erotic texts as devotional motets as well as marriage songs.

Veni in hortum meum (I am come into my garden), from the Sacrae cantiones of 1562 by Roland de Lassus, demonstrated this prolific and versatile composer’s mastery of late Renaissance counterpoint in the skillful interweaving of multiple melodic lines and at the same time his expressive use of declamation as all five voices came together on the words Comedite amici et bibite (Eat, O friends and drink). The vocal ensemble — Yulia Van Doren, soprano, Matthew White, countertenor, Colin Balzer tenor, Sumner Thompson, baritone, and Douglas Williams, bass-baritone — was ably led by director Stephen Stubbs. Still, one had the impression that these highly trained musicians could have performed as well — and perhaps with more immediacy — without a conductor. Indeed, for the remainder of the program Stubbs led from his place as luthenist and guitarist within the continuo ensemble, consisting of Maxine Eilander, baroque harp, Erin Headley, viola da gamba, and Jörg Jacobi, organ and harpsichord.

Selections from two early collections by Heinrich Schütz showed how the German composer, trained in Venice, absorbed both late-Renaissance Italian madrigal style and the newer freely expressive style of solo melody of early seventeenth-century opera. Madrigal style dominated in the four-voice settings from the Cantiones sacrae (Sacred Songs) of 1625, Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat (I sleep but my heart waketh) and Vulnerasti cor meum (Thou hast ravished my heart), sections in freely-imitative polyphony alternating with declamatory passages, the continuo band of organ, viola da gamba, harp, and lute providing color and harmonic support but no independent melodic lines. Published only four years later, Schütz’s Symphoniae sacrae (Sacred Symphonies) of 1629 call for solo voices and solo instruments along with basso continuo. Anima mea liquefacta est (My soul was melted) and Adiuro nos, filiae Jerusalem (I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem) has parts for two tenors (sung by Colin Balzer and Sumner Thompson) and two treble instruments (violinists Miloš Valent and Peter Spissky). Here Schütz’s depiction of stylized speech rhythms, so evident in his German-texted works, came to the fore along with brilliant passage work on expressive text words such as amore langueo (I am sick of love).

A setting of Nigra sum sed formosa (I am dark-skinned but comely) from the Song of Songs was included in Claudio Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers of 1610. Tenor soloist Colin Balzer delivered the beautifully evocative text with virtuosic panache, reaching an expressive high point on the words “surge amica mea” (arise my love). Countertenor Matthew White was the equally adept soloist in Monteverdi’s Ego flos campi (I am the flower of the field), with sweet, unforced tone and restrained ornamentation of the often wayward vocal line. The rapturous final love duet for Nero and Poppea is not from the Song of Songs, of course, and may not even be by Monteverdi. It has, however, a four-note descending-scale ground bass pattern supporting a catchy imitative duet for the lovers. As an instrumental interlude, Maxine Eilander and Stephen Stubbs devised a series of intricate variations on the ground and its melody that showed off the compositional inventiveness as well as the brilliant finger work of both performers in delightful style.

The first half of the program concluded with a selection from the oratorio Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima (The most holy limbs of our suffering Jesus) by Dietrich Buxtehude, composed in 1680. Each of its seven parts is a cantata dedicated to a different part of Christ’s crucified body. Part IV, addressed to the side (Ad latus), includes a concerto on the text Surge, amica mea (Arise my love) scored for two sopranos, alto, tenor, bass, two violins, and basso continuo. Buxtehude’s vivid concerto style, full of expressive dissonances and suspensions, was enhanced by the warmth and color of the instruments and the singers’ skillful use of vibrato and ornamentation.

After intermission we were introduced to the relatively unknown composer Domenico Mazzocchi, whose Dialogo della cantica paraphrasing the Song of Songs was composed in 1640 to celebrate the union of Paolo Borghese and Olimpia Aldobrandini. The varied scoring featured alternate verses sung by Yulia Van Doren, with choral responses by the male voices and echoes by Catherine Webster. In another paraphrase, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s grand motet Dilecti mi . . . Agnus innocens (O my beloved, O innocent Lamb) followed the spirit, if not the letter, of the Song of Songs with its rich late baroque harmonies and dramatic declamation (Les Voix Baroque used French-style Latin pronunciation here) exploiting both contrasting and blended tone colors in the scoring for a trio of countertenor, tenor, and bass with basso continuo. Charpentier’s shorter antiphon Pulchra es et decora (Thou art beautiful and comely) for the Assumption of the Virgin featured an upper-voice trio of two sopranos and countertenor. In between the two Charpentier works we were treated to another set of spirited ground-bass variations, this time a Passacaille for two violins and continuo by Marin Marais. In a continuous series of permutations, the la-sol-fa-mi bass and the melodic fantasies above it were heard in diatonic and in chromatic form, plain or ornamented, in duple or triple meter, by turns soulful or incisively percussive. Finally, all members of the ensemble joined forces for Henry Purcell’s setting of five familiar verses from the King James Bible: “My beloved spake . . . rise, my love, my fair one,” a truly magnificent close to an evening of stellar performances.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

A generation older than Lassus, Jacob Clement, known as Clemens non Papa (ca. 1510-ca. 1555), spent his entire career in the Low Countries. One of his few secular motets is a hymn in praise of music, Musica dei donum optimi (Music, the gift of the best god) for four voices. An enormously prolific composer, Clemens was also represented on the program by two five-voice sacred motets, the Marian hymn O Maria vernans rosa (O Mary, blooming rose) and the mournful Adesto dolori meo, a responsory from the Office of the Dead.

The third “star” composer on the program was Claude Le Jeune. Born around 1528 in Valenciennes, then part of the Imperial Low Countries, he settled in Paris and died there in 1600. A Protestant, Le Jeune is known for his numerous settings of the French-texted Huguenot Psalter tunes, but primarily as a leading exponent of musique mesurée à l’antique, a humanist attempt at reviving the ideals of Greek music in which double note values were assigned to long syllables and single values to short syllables. Despite their speculative origins, Le Jeune’s primarily chordal settings of French texts with their lilting rhythms based on alternating groups of two and three are simply delightful, as we heard in the beautiful wedding song Elle n’eust sçeu la chaleur esprouver/D’un feu plus beau (She could not have the warmth of a more beautiful fire) and the dialogue song Las, il n’a nul mal (Alas, he knows no sorrow) on the familiar narrative of the princess whose true love has been imprisoned by her father.

Ten more chansons by seven lesser-known composers rounded out the program. Although all but one were born in the Flemish provinces, service in the various imperial chapels took some of them as far afield as Spain, Italy, Austria, and Bohemia. These composers set French texts following one of two distinct, though often overlapping, traditions: that of the Franco-Flemish motet, with its continuous texture, overlapping cadences in the different voices, extended imitation and canon techniques, and avoidance of exact repetition, or that of the so-called “Parisian” chanson. Those on courtly texts were  characterized by brevity, “singable” phrases and clear cadences, chordal declamation, and use of exact repetition, often of the final poetic line, while those on popular, narrative texts favored imitative patter, dialogue, and refrains. Thus, in Nostre vicaire un jour des feste (Our vicar, one festival day) Annette mockingly compares his lusty singing of the Agnus dei to the braying of her ass, while another narrative crudely records the failed attempt of a mercenary French captain to take the brave city of Antwerp. Tylman Susato’s soulful De mon malheur me puis je bien contenter (Should I accept my unhappiness) is in the classic Parisian courtly vein. In one of the loveliest performances of the evening, Je sui aymé de la plus belle (I am loved by the most beauteous woman) by Jean Guyot  de Châtelet (Castileti), a brief text of four lines was deployed over interweaving contrapuntal lines.

Much of this music might not have survived without the rapid development of music printing during the sixteenth century and the efforts of printer-editor-publishers such as Tylman Susato. A player of wind instruments born near Cologne, he settled in Antwerp, where he produced some twenty-two books of chansons, nineteen books of motets, and three books of Masses along with numerous Dutch songs and psalm settings and dances. These publications included anthologies of composers active in the Low Countries and the Imperial Court along with editions of his own works and those of Josquin, Lassus, Clemens, and Crecquillon.

While many choral groups, presented with the vast repertory of Renaissance music, seem to rely on tried and true selections that turn up repeatedly in printed and recorded anthologies, Beekman is to be congratulated on her choice of a varied and unhackneyed program within a single geographical focus. She elicits sweet, unforced tone and precise intonation from her singers, leads them in flexible phrasing and a supple sense of line, and her tempos seem to be just right. One can only venture a few wishes for future performances by this corps of skilled and dedicated volunteer singers: a little more expressive intensity in the rendition of Latin devotional texts, and more forthright diction to enhance rhythmic definition in French chansons.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

A faculty recital by harpsichordist John Gibbons at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall on Monday evening, May 9th, presented masterworks of keyboard music from three centuries. Professor of Historical Performance at NEC and director of its Bach Ensemble, Gibbons is also well known to Boston audiences as a founding member, with violinist Daniel Stepner and viola da gambist Laura Jeppesen, of the Boston Museum Trio.

In Monday’s concert, Gibbons played a two-manual, five-octave French-style harpsichord by Boston builder Allan Winkler based on a 1711 instrument by Pierre Donzelague of Lyons. With two keyboards and three sets of strings (two eight-foot and one four-foot) it has far more tonal possibilities than the single-strung three-and-a-half octave instruments of William Byrd’s time. Yet Byrd, beginning in the 1570s, composed a body of works that raised English keyboard music to a high level and still make for delightful listening.

Gibbons opened his program with three pieces by Byrd, beginning with two stylized court dances, a paired pavan and galliard. Byrd’s pavans typically consist of a series of eight-measure “strains” in freely polyphonic style, each followed by an ornamented repetition that retains its melodic and harmonic skeleton while varying the texture with trills and passage work. The Pavan is in a sedate duple meter; the similarly constructed Galliard that follows is in somewhat faster triple meter. The second work, Byrd’s setting of a popular dance song Will you walk the woods so wild, opened with the tune in the top voice and thumping chords in the bass, then proceeded through thirteen variations in which the tune migrated to inner voices, sometimes altered beyond recognition, and increasingly complex finger work enriched the texture. In the Fantasy in C, virtuoso passage work alternated with sections in fugal style. Gibbons played this music in a refreshingly straightforward manner, sensitive to its engaging details but devoid of miniaturist mannerism.

A famous virtuoso in his day, Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) is known primarily for his keyboard music. The Partite sopra l’aria di Ruggiero is one of several sets of variations he composed on a popular sixteen-measure dance bass. A freer composition, Toccata XI from his Partitas and Toccatas Book I is infused with caprice in its headlong scale passages and shifting modes, and here I wished that Gibbons had taken a somewhat more supple approach to tempo and phrasing. Indeed, the notation of the Prélude in F major by Louis Couperin (1626-1661) demands such an approach from the performer. It is entirely in whole notes (Gibbons held up the score for the audience to see), with only elegantly drawn slurs to provide hints as to the approximate duration and grouping of notes; even fast passages and trills appear uniformly as apparently slow large white notes. It is up to the performer of these preludes to distinguish among chordal, melodic, and ornamental tones and to realize coherent progressions out of what appear at first glance to be unfinished sketches. An uncle of the more famous François-le-Grand, this Couperin is one of the most important harpsichord composers of the seventeenth century, but he died young and none of his music was published in his lifetime.

Following the unmeasured prelude, Gibbons played a group of six stylized dances in F major, concluding with a lively chaconne, a series of variations (couplets) interspersed with a short refrain on a familiar dance bass. The Tombeau de Mr. de Blanrocher that followed was an entirely different sort of piece, a tribute to a lutenist friend of Couperin’s who fell downstairs and died without receiving absolution. Suspended dissonances and chromatic pitches added to the “pathetic” affect of this piece in solemn French overture style.

From the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I of Johann Sebastian Bach Gibbons chose the Preludes and Fugues in F-sharp major and F-sharp minor, two pieces contrasting in both affect and technique. Here Gibbons showed how the harpsichord can be coaxed into denying its apparent physical limitations to produce singing tone and clearly-defined inner voices. Finally, we were treated to a fine performance of Bach’s Partita IV in D Major. Each of the six partitas opens with a movement in a different style. The  Ouverture in D major, the favored key of trumpets and drums, is in the grand style of French Baroque opera, its scalar flourishes and exaggerated dotted rhythms followed by a sprightly fugue in triple time. In the Allemande, Gibbons skillfully brought out the additional voices implied within the complex arabesques of single melodic lines and in the Courante, subtle shifts between binary and ternary groupings in 3/2 meter. The Gigue, with its long and complex subject worked out in a dazzling motoric fugue, brought this summa of Bach’s writing for keyboard to a brilliant conclusion.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The program opened with Mozart’s Ave verum corpus (Hail, true body), composed in June 1791. Characterized by exquisitely balanced, transparent, and deceptively simple part writing for four voices, with minimal thematic input from the instrumental accompaniment, the motet is a favorite of choirs the world over, but seldom as beautifully performed as we heard it last night. The choir of thirty-six voices was trained to perfection by chorus-master John Finney. Christophers eschewed fussy dynamics and slow tempo, reading Adagio in cut-C as “slow but steady” half-note beats that allowed the restrained melodic and harmonic subtleties to unfold without pathos or exaggeration.

A very different side of Mozart’s activity during his final year was displayed in the concert aria for bass voice and orchestra, Per questa bella mano (K612). Composed in March 1791 for Franz Xaver Gerl, who sang the role of Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio and was the first Sarastro in The Magic Flute, it features a virtuosic obbligato part for double bass. Playing a five-string instrument with a baroque bow, bassist Robert Nairn proved more than a match for the intricate figuration — much of it in double stops — and wide melodic span of his part. Bass-baritone Eric Owens chose not to exploit the potentially comic aspects of this incongruous setting of a serious love poem, demonstrating that his ample voice of sizeable range and power was also capable of considerable expressive nuance.

Handel’s opulent setting of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus Domino meo (The Lord said unto my Lord) for five-part choir and five-part string ensemble dates from his early years in Rome; it was completed in 1707.  Soprano Elizabeth Watts and mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella were the excellent principal soloists, with shorter solo contributions from choir members Margot Rood and Teresa Wakim, sopranos, mezzo Abigail Levis, tenors Randy McGee, and bass Woodrow Bynum. Christophers’s springy tempos and driving rhythm emphasized the dramatic moments in Handel’s setting, although occasionally one might have wished for a greater sense of line in longer phrases. Highlights included the contrast of homophony and fugue in the chorus Juravit Dominuus (The Lord hath sworn), detached, percussive chords on the words “conquassibit capita” (he shall wound the heads), and piquant suspensions on the words “De torrente in via bibet” (He shall drink of the brook along the way).

The central work on the program was the Mozart Requiem, heard after the intermission. As is well known, in the summer of 1791 the Mass was commissioned anonymously by a Count von Walsegg, who wished to pass the work off as his own, in memory of his wife. Mozart did not begin continuous work on the Requiem until his return from Prague in mid-September, and it was left unfinished when he died on December 5th. His widow Constanze had the work completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr and delivered to the still unknown client. Several performances took place after Mozart’s death, and a full score was published in Leipzig in 1800. A still unsettled controversy ensued over how much of the Requiem could be called Mozart’s. The original manuscripts remained unavailable until 1838, when they were discovered in Count von Walsegg’s estate, and in 1962 a single sheet of autograph sketches was discovered containing a fragment of the Rex tremendae and sixteen measures of an Amen fugue to conclude the Sequence (at the end of the Lacrymosa). Although at least three others have been shown to have had a hand in completing the Requiem as delivered to the Count, only Süssmayr, who died in 1803, admitted to having done so.

By all accounts, Süssmayr’s compositional skills, particularly in contrapuntal writing, were mediocre at best. Recent studies, summarized in the introduction to Robert Levin’s completion of the Requiem (Stuttgart Mozart Editions) suggest that some of the music claimed to be exclusively Süssmayr’s is better than what he could have produced entirely on his own, and that he may have had access to sketches that are no longer extant. Constanze referred to “a few scraps of paper with music on them” found among Mozart’s papers after his death and given to Süssmayr, but we do not know whether they contained additional material that Süssmayr might have used in completing Mozart’s work. Levin corrected some of Süssmayr’s most glaring errors, composed a fugal Amen for the Lacrymosa based on Mozart’s sketch, and refined some of Süssmayr’s overly thick orchestration. In the Sanctus, he replaced the reprise of the Hosanna fugue, which Süssmayr transposed to B-flat, the key of the preceding Benedictus, with a shortened version in D major, the key in which it first appears.

The Handel and Haydn Society’s performance appears to have been based instead on the edition prepared by Leopold Nowak for the New Mozart Edition (Bärenreiter), which reproduces the Requiem in the traditional form known since the first printed edition of 1800. The performance by the choir, period orchestra, and vocal quartet of soprano, mezzo, and bass soloists joined by tenor Andrew Kennedy was generally of a very high level, and there were many breathtaking moments. Among these were the duet between bass-baritone Eric Owens and trombonist Gregory Spiridopoulos at the opening of Tuba mirum, the duo of “basset horns” (low clarinets in F) in the Recordare, and the exquisite choral sound of the Hostias. Christophers’s interpretation again stressed the dramatic aspects of the text, especially striking when the opening words of the Sequence, Dies irae, immediately and startlingly invoked the wrath of God following the Kyrie’s plea for mercy. While there is no reason for a concert performance to replicate liturgical usage (which would have included intervening prayers and the plainchant Gradual and Tract), perhaps a moment’s pause for reflection between movements would have been in order.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The first half of the program opened with two works by Victoria’s older contemporary Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599). Chapel master at the cathedral of Seville, his music was widely performed in Latin America as well as in Spain. For the eight-voice Easter motet Regina caeli laetare (Rejoice, Queen of heaven), the singers, five women and five men, were arranged in a single row, with the women placed at either end. Overlapping imitative entries in various combinations of voices resulted in a continuous polyphonic interweaving of the parts rather than antiphonal opposition between two four-voice choirs. Textural contrast was all the more striking at the hushed prayer Ora pro nobis (Pray God for us) sung by only the four upper voice parts. In keeping with its mournful text, Guerrero’s six-voice motet, Heu mihi, Domine (Woe is me, O Lord), was couched in darker tones with chromatic shadings.

Born in 1590 in Malaga, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla emigrated to Mexico to serve at the cathedral of Puebla from 1622 until his death in 1664. His six-voice setting of the poignant Lamentations of Jeremiah text reserves its most florid contrapuntal flights, colored by expressive dissonances and frequent juxtaposition of natural and sharped cadential notes, for the “inexpressive” Hebrew letters that head each of the three sections. The four-voice setting of Sancta mater, istud agas that followed was once attributed to Josquin des Prez, whose music was well known to Spanish cathedral choirs from the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is actually the work of his contemporary Francisco da Peñalosa (ca. 1470-1528), chapel-master to Ferdinand V. The text consists of stanzas 11 to 14 of the famous Stabat mater dolorosa hymn, a meditation on the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion. In contrast to the short phrases and chordal harmonies of the works heard in the rest of the program, the influence of late-fifteenth-century Netherlandish polyphony, with its imitative entries and longer contrapuntal lines, was apparent here, declamatory homophony all the more striking when it made its appearance on the words “Crucifixo” and “Iuxta crucem.” Only five singers took part in the performance of this four-voice setting, a welcome tonal contrast that gave increased clarity to individual lines.

All ten singers were on hand for Alonso Lobo’s motet Versa est in luctum (My harp is turned to mourning), composed in 1598 for the funeral of Philip II. Here the frequent suspension dissonances so characteristic of late-sixteenth-century polyphony lent their urgency to a rich contrapuntal fabric in six voices. Next we heard Sebastian de Vivanco’s Magnificat octavi toni (Magnificat on the eighth tone, 1607). The title refers to the plainchant formula in mode 8 (hypomixolydian on G) to which alternate verses of the Annunciation canticle are sung, the other verses being sung in polyphony. The plainchant verses, beautifully intoned by one of the tenors, provided a foil to the chordal magnificence of the eight-voice polyphonic sections.

The signature work on the program, Victoria’s six-voice Requiem was written for the funeral of the Dowager Empress Maria, sister of Philip II and Victoria’s patroness, who died in 1603. In addition to the movements of the Mass for the Dead, it contains an introductory lesson, “Taedet animam meam” (I am weary at heart of my life) from Matins and a funeral motet, “Versa est in luctum cithara mea.” (The same text was heard earlier in the program in the setting by Alonso Lobo.) Built around a plainchant cantus firmus in the second soprano, the largely chordal polyphony reached its emotional highpoint in the Responsory, in sustained chords on the words “Requiem aeternam.”

With their own fortieth anniversary only a couple of years away, the Tallis Scholars under founding director Peter Phillips have long enjoyed a reputation as the “gold standard” among exponents of Renaissance choral music. Over nearly four decades, Phillips has been able to attract singers with beautiful voices and outstanding musicianship and to mold them into an ensemble notable for its impeccable intonation, precise rhythm, and convincing declamation. With concerts around the world and a large and diverse catalog of recordings, the beauty and conviction of their performances have gathered them an appreciative audience for Renaissance choral music that is far from limited to fans of “early music.” If in recent years their vibrant tone has sometimes sounded forced, even strident, particularly in very resonant venues such as the rose- and ivory-tinted marbles of St. Paul Church — and perhaps more so from my vantage point in the third row of the nave — it was nevertheless a thrill to hear this endlessly fascinating music so expertly performed.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The second son of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was his sole teacher, C.P.E. Bach not only saw to the preservation of his father’s musical legacy but enjoyed a brilliant and influential career of his own. For nearly thirty years he served as harpsichordist to the flute-playing Frederick the Great of Prussia before succeeding his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann in Hamburg as Kantor of the Latin School and music director in five churches, a position similar to the one his father had held in Leipzig. In addition to his church music for Hamburg, he composed songs, chamber music, harpsichord concertos, symphonies, and, as an internationally admired keyboard virtuoso, a vast amount of solo keyboard music that was much admired by Haydn and the young Beethoven. His Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments is to this day the standard guide to eighteenth-century keyboard technique, accompaniment, and improvisation as well as aesthetics.

C.P.E. Bach is considered the foremost exponent of the so-called empfindsam, or highly sensitive, style cultivated in northern Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Characterized by abrupt changes of mood, melodies and rhythms patterned after rhetorical speech, and minute gradations of dynamics, the style was associated particularly with solo music for the clavichord and the early fortepiano, both instruments capable of subtle gradations in dynamics and tone color not available on the harpsichord. Tuesday’s program centered on Bach’s “public” works, symphonies and concertos intended for a concert stage and a large audience rather than an intimate salon. Yet even in these works, his idiosyncratic approach to form and expression was evident. The Symphony in G that opened the program is one of six composed in 1773 for Gottfried van Swieten, the Austrian ambassador to the Prussian court, whose Viennese concerts of music by Emanuel and Sebastian Bach inspired Mozart’s interest in counterpoint. The first movement opens fortissimo, followed by pianissimo writing in which remote harmonies are already introduced. Norrington and the twenty-two highly skilled players of period stringed instruments made the most of the dynamic contrasts, sudden shifts of mood, and abrupt transitions heard throughout the three movements, following one another without interruption.

The orchestra’s harpsichordist, Steven Devine, who provided essential but barely heard harmonic support from the back of the orchestra’s inverted “V” formation during the symphonies, was the soloist in the early Harpsichord Concerto in C Major. The beautiful instrument by D. Jacques Way, modeled after an original by Henri Hemsch in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts collection, was moved to the front of the stage and its lid raised, projecting the sound forward and incidentally offering the audience a view of the exquisite  painted landscape on its underside.

The concerto’s opening orchestral ritornello was repeated closely by the harpsichord. Thereafter, the solo episodes became progressively more complex as well as more expressive, virtuosic flights of fancy punctuated by sober interjections from the orchestra. In the second movement, Adagio, the harpsichord part was full of the expressive sighing motives typical of the empfindsam style. Lively exchanges between harpsichord and strings in the finale, Allegro assai, culminated in a virtuosic and improvisatory cadenza for the soloist, beautifully played.

The third work on the program, another Symphony in G major, is Bach’s first known symphony. Light in tone but energetic, the first movement is full of upward sweeps that end suddenly in midair. The second movement, almost Handelian in its pastoral tone and full of expressive offbeats in galant style, was followed by a graceful Allegretto. After the intermission we heard the Symphony in E major, the sixth of the Van Swieten set. Opening with a graceful antecedent/consequent phrase, the first movement immediately launches into modulatory excursions. A recitative-like passage leads directly into a tonally diffuse Poco Andante, concluding with a quirky finale, Allegro spiritoso, played staccato with a single cantabile interlude.

Richard Lester was the soloist in the Concerto in A major for Cello and Orchestra, which also exists in parallel versions for flute and for harpsichord. The second movement, Largo con sordini (muted strings), opened with an aria for violins and violas in unison, punctuated by cellos and basses. The cello then took the lead, spinning out the motives of the aria melody in dialogue with the orchestra, ending with an impassioned cadenza before the somber conclusion. Thanks to Lester’s exquisite playing, this was the expressive highlight of the evening. The Presto finale was a perpetual motion flight of triplet arpeggios with capricious interruptions.

A joyous Symphony in E flat Major concluded the program with an opening Prestissimo full of unexpected turns, followed immediately by a lyrical Larghetto, and concluding with a Presto in “hunting horn” triplets.

Founded in 1984, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is one of the top ensembles performing a varied repertory of Baroque and classical music on period instruments. They have never had a permanent conductor, and have worked not only with specialist conductors but also with “mainstream” conductors, beginning with Charles Mackerras and Simon Rattle, a collaboration that has helped bring “early music” approaches to performance — crisp articulation, livelier tempos — into the mainstream. Along with a very high level of skill, the energy and enthusiasm of the group, their apparent joy in music making without pretentiousness or solemnity, are infectious. Sir Roger Norrington has been bringing his keen insight, and again, infectious joy, into performances of “early” orchestral music for nearly five decades. Perhaps in an effort to stress the volatile and capricious nature of C.P.E. Bach’s music, he indulged in some mannerisms Tuesday night — prolonged hesitation before the final downbeat of a movement, exaggerated pauses mid-movement — that could be effective when used sparingly but as routine gestures became trite. But none of this could seriously detract from a fascinating tribute to an composer honored more in reputation than in practice, music that deserved to be heard and enjoyed.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

An Easter cantata, Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn (Today God’s Son triumphs) by Dieterich Buxtehude (1567-1643) opened the program. Scored for five-voice chorus and a five-part string ensemble with continuo augmented by celebratory trumpets and kettledrums, the cantata consists of verses for soloists or solo ensembles alternating with triumphant choruses on the words “Victoria Victoria.” The initial verse movement followed an opening string sinfonia and an echo fanfare for trumpets (natural, i.e. valveless, instruments expertly played by Jesse Levine and Robinson Pyle) and timpani (John Grimes). The chorus consisted of twenty-one exceptionally beautiful voices, including the soloists Roberta Anderson and Megan Weikleenget (sopranos), Martin Near (alto), David McSweeney (tenor) and Ulysses Thomas (baritone). Although the choral sound was never forced, it tended to overshadow the string ensemble, playing one-on-a-part. A better balance of vocal and instrumental sound seemed called for here. Pearlman’s conducting favors quick, detached singing and playing, certainly refreshing to ears jaded by the plodding tempos of earlier generations of Baroque interpretation. But by pushing the singers to the limits of audible declamation, Pearlman sometimes obscured the nuances of text expression as well as the natural gavotte-like swing of some movements.

A tendency to rush was also apparent in Claudio Monteverdi’s six-voice setting of Psalm 112, Beatus vir qui timet Dominum (Blessed is the man who fears the Lord). As Pearlman pointed out in his excellent program notes, the text offers many opportunities for word painting, and Monteverdi takes full advantage of them. The first and last sections are also carried along rhythmically by wonderful walking bass patterns in duple meter, with a new, rising pattern in the triple-meter middle section. Again, no need to compress these buoyant rhythms into tempi just a bit too fast for clear text declamation. The instrumental ensemble of expert Baroque players — Christina Day Martinson and Julia McKenzie, violins, Laura Jeppesen and Barbara Wright, violas, Sarah Freiberg, cello, Deborah Dunham, violone, with Pearlman at the harpsichord — was much enhanced by Victor Coelho’s theorbo, which rounded out the continuo with velvety yet percussive articulation.

The centerpiece of the program was Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda of 1624, certainly a jewel and, for many, an intriguing discovery. In the unlikely tale from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem on the First Crusade Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), Tancred, a Christian knight, challenges the Saracen warrior Clorinda to single combat, believing her to be a man. After dealing her a mortal blow, he lifts her helmet, only to discover she is the woman he loves. As she dies, she forgives him and asks him to baptize her. To depict the anger and violence of war, Monteverdi invented what he referred to as the stile concitato (agitated style), full of fast repeated notes,  plucked strings, and exaggerated dynamics. These virtuosic and, at the time, novel instrumental effects also appear in the vocal part of the narrator, who carries the principal role. Tenor Aaron Sheehan, stepping in at the last minute for an ailing Keith Jameson, sang with ringing tone and stylistic sensitivity to the nuances of Monteverdi’s dramatic recitative. Baritone Bradford Gleim was a fine Tancredi and Mary Wilson a stalwart Clorinda, particularly moving in  the rising melody of  her dying words “S’apre il ciel: io vado in pace” (Heaven opens, I go in peace), an effect worthy of Verdi in its other-worldly pianissimo.

Heinrich Biber (1644-1704) was known as the outstanding violin virtuoso of his time and is remembered today primarily for his fifteen extremely difficult Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas for solo violin and continuo. As Kapellmeister at the archbishop’s court in Salzburg for three decades beginning in the 1670s, he was also expected to produce choral music on the grand scale. Boston Baroque performed three of his less ambitious choral works — two psalm settings from a 1693 collection for the Vespers service, and the Agnus Dei from a recently discovered Mass. Teresa Wakim, soprano, Thea Lobo, alto, Murray Kidd, tenor, and Ulysses Thomas, bass, were the soloists in Laudate pueri (Psalm 113). The Agnus Dei featured a trio of bass soloists: Bradford Gleim, Brett Johnson, and Ulysses Thomas, with trumpet and strings joining the organ and violone in a ritornello before the final section. The Gloria patri of the Laudate Dominum (Psalm 117) setting, in which chorus and instrumental ensemble compete in conflicting meters, tested the agility of both performers and listeners.

Christina Day Martinson, concertmaster of Boston Baroque, had two additional violins at the ready for the performance of two of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, each differently tuned according to Biber’s instructions. For Sonata no. 10, dedicated to the Crucifixion, the top string is tuned down from e” to d” and the lowest string down from g to e. After a mostly chordal Prelude, a tuneful Aria was followed by increasingly complex variations, climaxing in a fast gigue tempo before a brief return to the Aria and a final, breathtaking tremolo passage. The fourteenth sonata is dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin. Here the two lowest strings are each tuned up a whole step. The Preludium consists of improvisatory passage work with melodic interludes. In the triple-meter Ciaccona that followed, Victor Coelho’s theorbo was a perfect foil for Martinson as she danced her way through a series of virtuosic divisions on the bass pattern, ending with a lively Gigue.

A Gloria that was only recently confirmed as an early work by Handel concluded the program. Mary Wilson was the soprano soloist in this brilliant setting in Italian cantata style that probably dates from Handel’s stay in Italy during the early 1700s. Accompanied recitative, with two violins and continuo participating, alternate with elaborate arias in concerted style. The trumpet-like pyrotechnics in this piece might call for a more brilliant vocal tone, particularly in the lower range, than Wilson was able to produce, but she displayed expert musicianship and a sure sense of style throughout.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

As Bezuidenhout took pains to point out, Mozart’s solo piano works, like Beethoven’s, were written for two distinct audiences, public and private, neither of them resembling the respectfully silent audiences of today. Sonatas were written for his pupils, usually talented noblewomen, who might have performed them at an after-dinner soirée, but not before a larger public. Carefully notated to reflect the composer’s intentions as precisely as possible in scores prepared for publication, they represent a continuous effort to expand the language of the classical three-movement sonata form. At his public subscription concerts, on the other hand, for which Mozart, a top virtuoso, acted as his own impresario, audiences were attracted both by his keyboard skill and his inventiveness in works with a strongly improvisatory component. Fantasies, more or less rhapsodic in structure, and variations on popular songs and opera arias were apt to be summarily notated or not written down at all. Friday’s program was designed to demonstrate Mozart’s genius at both types of composition, for public and for private consumption.

The evening began with the Sonata in F major, K.332, notable for its quicksilver changes of mood and character in   the first movement. Bezuidenhout lovingly brought out every nuance, with beautifully voiced “horn calls” and parallel thirds, crisp offbeat accents, and judicious ornamentation in the repetition of the exposition. In the leisurely paced Adagio, ornaments seemed to grow naturally out of the melody, rendered in an astonishing variety of tone colors within a relatively small dynamic range. The Finale, by contrast, was full of capricious shifts from exuberant flights of fancy to mock-serious marching octaves, only to die away in an unexpected pianissimo.

Also in F major, the set of eight variations on “Ein Weib ist das herrlichste Ding” (a wife is the most glorious thing) was composed in the spring of 1791 and was to be Mozart’s last composition for solo piano. The theme was taken from a Singspiel number by Benedikt Schack, a good friend of Mozart and creator of the role of Tamino in the Magic Flute. Bezuidenhout was every bit the match for Mozart’s virtuosic tour de force, the humdrum, four-square formal pattern of the theme continually broken by improvisatory excursions into brilliant passage work and chromatic ornamentation.

The Fantasia in C minor, K. 396, composed possibly in 1782, and originally for violin and piano, was left in fragmentary form; it was completed and arranged for solo piano after Mozart’s death by the Abbé Maximilian Stadler, musical adviser to his widow Constanze. Arpeggios and scales ripple up and down the full range of the keyboard, snatches of melodic themes emerging from thickets of passagework. With exquisite variations of touch and impeccable timing, Bezuidenhout brought out the dynamic and textural caprice of this written-out fantasy, offering us a window into a lost world of keyboard improvisation. The program concluded with the Sonata in B flat major, K. 333. In the opening movement, with its beautifully balanced periods, Bezuidenhout impressed us with his willingness to breathe between phrases much as a singer does, while maintaining a lively Allegro pace. The repeated exposition and its recapitulation brought, in lieu of more extrovert ornamentation, the subtlest of changes in the melodic line. After the Andante cantabile, with its beautifully voiced thirds in harmonic excursions, the Finale, a joyous rondo, was delivered with dramatic panache. For an encore, we heard the Andante cantabile from the Sonata in C major, K. 330.

The third hero of the evening was Rodney Regier, builder of the beautiful fortepiano that was loaned for the occasion from his workshop in Freeport, Maine. Patterned after instruments produced ca. 1785-1795 by the famous Viennese piano builder Anton Walter, the instrument has a brilliant, ringing treble register, crisp clear bass, and singing middle register, each with its own expressive potential. Its two pedals are actually knee levers; one controls the dampers, and the other, a “moderator,” pushes felt pads against the strings to produce a velvety, almost “ghostly” tone color that is particularly effective in soft and harmonically ambiguous passages. And since Mozart reveled in employing every single note at both ends of the  keyboard, his music played on a five-octave instrument paradoxically never seems to be holding back or miniaturist, as it too often does when played on a large modern piano.

A specialist in the performance of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century keyboard music on period instruments, Bezuidenhout was born in South Africa, studied in Australia and the United States, and now lives in London. He  returns to Boston this June to appear at the biannual Boston Early Music Festival.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Imperial Chinese interest in European music dates probably from the time of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, one of the first Europeans to master classical Chinese, who offered a harpsichord to an earlier emperor in 1598. This interest was further nurtured during the eighteenth century by the presence at court of the Italian musician, missionary, and priest Teodorico Pedrini, who arrived in 1711 after an arduous nine-year journey, and Joseph-Marie Amiot, who arrived in Beijing in 1751. Pedrini’s only known surviving compositions, twelve sonatas for violin and basso continuo, are preserved in the Beijing National Library; Houtman and Collignon managed to procure a copy during a visit there a few years ago. Amiot, who remained in Beijing until his death in 1793, wrote several influential studies of Chinese music and transcribed some fifty-four Chinese tunes into western staff notation.

Houtman started off the program with one of these tunes, which she played on a Chinese end-blown flute, or xiao, while advancing slowly toward the stage from the back of the hall. A slender bamboo tube around three feet long, the xiao has six finger holes and is held at a forty-five-degree angle. Houtman became interested in the instrument while in Beijing, then worked with a Chinese master teacher in Paris. She also journeyed to India to study the bansuri, or traditional transverse flute. As she walked onto the stage, she was met by Collignon, who joined her with an improvisation on the haunting pentatonic melody. Pausing only long enough for Houtman to exchange her xiao for a Baroque treble recorder, the two launched into a spirited performance of the first of three Pedrini sonatas on the program. Although it was originally composed for violin, Houtman made the part her own with expressive ornamentation that grew naturally out of the melodic line rather than being merely superimposed on it, clarity all the way down to the bottom of the range, and a seemingly inexhaustible breath supply. Collignon was her skillful partner, adding his own embellishments to the continuo realization.

In his Mémoire de la musique des Chinois, Joseph-Marie Amiot mentioned the “melodious and brilliant flute airs” by the French flute virtuoso Michel Blavet (1700-1768) that were played for Chinese connoisseurs as a demonstration of European musical refinement. In his Sonata for Flute and Continuo, op. 2, no. 3, movements in Italian style — an Adagio, an Allemanda, and a final Giga — enclose an ingratiating Rondeau ornamented in the French style and a pair of rustic Tambourins in which Collignon  displayed the harpsichord’s percussive possibilities. According to Amiot’s account, music by Rameau was also played for Chinese audiences. Certainly a virtuosic piece like La Dauphine would have made a strong impression. Collignon played it for all it was worth: rushing arpeggios, crossed hands on two keyboards of contrasting tone quality, and unexpected modulations all contributed to the dramatic effect. A second sonata by Pedrini concluded the first half of the program. The two slow movements (Grave) surrounding the central Allegro were of the type all too often rendered as bare bones chords of no particular interest. Collignon’s improvised lead-ins provided logical transitions to the succeeding fast movements, entirely in the spirit of eighteenth-century practice.

The second part of the program opened with another traditional Chinese melody on the xiao, doubled heterophonically with an ornamented version on the harpsichord, and a twentieth-century piece, The Willow Leaf, by Liu Ye Jing. Another Pedrini Sonata was notable for its playful echo effects in the second movement, Vivace, a sprightly Balletto, and an Allegro with ornamented reprises. Two more harpsichord pieces by Rameau, the strangely expressive L’Enharmonique and the famously descriptive La Poule, followed by a brilliantly played sonata by Corelli completed the program. A surprise encore was an arrangement for soprano recorder and Renaissance guitar of Rameau’s Tambourine.

Saturday’s concert was the second in the 2011 series sponsored by Pro Musicis. Founded in France by Father Eugène Merlet, a Capuchin-Franciscan priest and musician, and now celebrating its forty-fifth season, Pro Musicis offers its International Award to solo musicians chosen for their ability to communicate. The group performs in concert halls but also in prisons, homes for the aged and the disabled, substance abuse treatment centers, and other venues in order to share the healing gifts of music with those in need. The next concert in the series takes place at Longy on March 5 with Erin Keefe, violin, and Anna Polonsky, piano, followed on April 2 with a recital by the Israeli harpist,  Sivan Magen.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

The three string trios of Op. 9, composed in 1797-1798, already demonstrate a command of ensemble writing for strings that was to come to full fruition in the Op. 18 quartets, completed just two years later. Violinist Danielle Maddon, violist Mark Berger, and cellist David Russell, depicted with panache the many moods — solemn and quixotic, lyrical and fiery —traversed in the four movements of the Trio in G major, Op. 9, No. 1. It was a lively conversation among three equally accomplished players.

The second part of the program was devoted to songs in German and Italian. With his eye on entering the prestigious world of opera, Beethoven composed several settings in 1809 of texts by the longtime Vienna court opera librettist Pietro Metastasio. In Oh care selve, a lover contrasts the freedom of the sylvan environment with the deceit and artificiality of love at Court. The tenor soloist, Matthew Anderson, brought a warmly resonant timbre and artful phrasing to this short arietta. The German song Adelaide was composed in 1795-1796 to a rather sentimental text by Friedrich von Matthisson in classical “Sapphic” form. Beethoven set the four stanzas, each of which ends with a pleading cry to the beloved, as a through-composed mini-drama ending in an “Allegro molto” march by the unsuccessful lover toward death and transfiguration.  Here Anderson sang with beautiful tone and lyric sensitivity, although sometimes at the expense of clear German diction. He seemed more at home, and his diction more incisive, in his lively and well-paced rendition of the humorous (and slight risqué) narrative Der Kuss. Beethoven composed the comic arietta in an accessible, popular style in 1798 while working on more weighty projects and resurrected it only in 1825 for publication as Op. 128.

The next two songs on the program were both probably composed in 1795 and published together in 1803 without opus number. Ich liebe dich is a straightforward yet affecting setting of a text by the early romantic poet Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Herrosee that could almost have been composed by Schubert. In La Partenza, to a canzonetta text by Metastasio, Beethoven introduces Mozartean chromatic touches in an otherwise simple melody. Mezzo-soprano Krista River delivered both songs with sweetness of tone and a touch of whimsy.

River was also the soloist for the first two of Four Ariettas and a Duet, Op. 82, composed in 1809 (or possibly earlier), part of Beethoven’s ongoing essays in Italian operatic forms. Dimmi, ben mio, che m’ami, set to an anonymous text, and T’intendo, si, mio cor (Metastasio) depict the pangs of love, displaying the full expressive range of River’s singing. In L’amante impaziente, the text is sung first by the mezzo-soprano, then by the tenor, each awaiting the appearance of the other with the breathless excitement of a Cherubino. The fourth arietta brought the two singers together with a stanza for each and a final duet.

Adroit and stylish accompaniment by pianist Sergey Schepkin provided spirited support for all of these songs. Schepkin was joined by violinist Danielle Maddon and cellist David Russell for the Piano Trio in c minor, Op. 1, No. 3. Published in 1795 and the first of Beethoven’s works to be honored by him with an opus number, the trios were an immediate success, in spite of Haydn’s concerns about the fierceness of its mood. C minor, as Maynard Solomon points out, was always a dramatic key for Beethoven, from the pathétique tone of his early works to the heroic mood of the Fifth Symphony and the Coriolanus Overture. The grand design and virtuosity of the c-minor Trio were exploited to the full by the three players. Among the highlights were brilliant playing by Schepkin in the Prestissimo Finale, masterful rendering by the ensemble of the quirky accents in the Menuetto, and beautiful duet interchange between violin and cello in the second movement minore variation.

Emmanuel Music is to be commended for bringing us Beethoven’s earlier, and often lesser known, chamber works in an intimate and congenial setting, and we are grateful that Ryan Turner, now in his second year as Artistic Director, is carrying on the tradition established by founder Craig Smith. Part of a multi-year survey of vocal and chamber works of Beethoven, the Winter Beethoven Chamber Series concludes Sunday, February 27, with Piano Trio no. 4, the Quintet for Piano and Winds in E flat, and the Septet in E flat for winds and strings.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

As it happens, this was the second performance in the Boston area this season of the Musikalische Exequien, a multi-movement work composed for the 1636 Lutheran funeral of Heinrich Posthumus of Reuss-Gera. a small German principality. (For further historical details, see this reviewer’s account of the October 23rd concert by Musica Sacra here.) Born just a hundred years before J. S. Bach, Schütz was sent to Venice by his Protestant German patrons to study the latest madrigal and polychoral techniques with Giovanni Gabrieli.  But the expressive vitality of his music reflects primarily an extraordinary sensitivity to the declamatory rhythms of German speech, ornamented with rhetorical flourishes that enhance the meaning of the Biblical texts. Leading from a small continuo organ, Jodry brought out the expressive potential of the solos, duets, and trios alternating with six-voice cappella sections in the opening German Missa (corresponding to the Kyrie and Gloria of the Latin Mass). For the second movement, “Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe,” two four-voice choirs faced each other in a motet evoking the Venetian polychoral style. In the third and final movement, a setting of the Canticle of Simeon (Nunc dimittis), two sopranos and a bass representing seraphim were placed in the back of the church along with theorbo player Ryaan Ahmed, heavenly commentators on the text sung by the choir.

The first part of the program presented a variety of shorter funeral pieces, in which Jodry joined the choir as bass singer. The Funeral Ikos by the English composer John Tavener, born in 1944 (not to be confused with John Taverner, born ca. 1490) uses text from the Greek Orthodox Order for the Burial of Dead Priests. Chant-like passages based on Byzantine Church modes alternated with choral passages in spare harmony, often coalescing in unison at phrase endings. The transparent texture of this meditative work contrasted with the densely imitative High Renaissance polyphony of Nicolas Gombert’s six-voice motet on David’s lament for his son Absalom, with its mournful refrain “O fili mi” (O my son). In J. S. Bach’s funeral motet for eight-voice double choir, Komm, Jesu, komm, the Schola singers’ precise German diction gave full play to the many nuances of text expression.

Three anthems by Henry Purcell, based on texts from the Burial Service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, were set for four-voice choir with continuo accompaniment. In a remarkable passage in the second anthem, chromatic harmonies on the words “the bitter pains of eternal death” illustrated Purcell’s individual approach to this emotional text. Finally, the American choral composer Edwin Fissinger’s “Lux aeterna” from the Mass for the Dead featured soprano Margot Rood’s exquisite singing, floating above block harmonies in the choir.

In this rich and varied program, Jodry and the Schola Cantorum demonstrated their mastery of a number of choral styles from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, all of them indebted in one way or another to the ideals of Renaissance polyphony. The ensemble marks its twenty-fifth anniversary this season and will celebrate with a performance of Dufay’s Missa Ecce ancilla Domini along with anthems by Lasso, Tallis, and Victoria at the Rhode Island School of Design on April 9th, honoring the re-opening of the museum’s Renaissance galleries. The program will be repeated in Boston on April 15 at St. Paul’s Church, Brookline and on April 16t at St. John the Evangelist, Beacon Hill.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Familiar to concertgoers and amateur musicians today as the prolific composer of pleasing and not-too-demanding instrumental music, Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) was as much admired in his own day for his operas, passions, and sacred and secular cantatas as for his concertos and chamber music. A largely self-taught composer and performer from a young age, he held a number of important civic and court positions in Germany before settling in Hamburg as Kantor of its five principal churches. While his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach chafed at the restrictions imposed on him by the town council and produced no more than five cycles of cantatas for the Lutheran church year during his twenty-seven-year tenure as Kantor in Leipzig, Telemann is known to have composed some thirty-one cycles. In addition he served as musical director and frequent composer for the Hamburg opera, conductor of the Collegium Musicum, and highly successful publisher and promoter of his own compositions. Contemporary theorists and critics praised Telemann’s music for just those qualities of ease and apparent artlessness — characteristics of the more forward-looking galant style — that they found lacking in the elaborate counterpoint of composers like J.S. Bach.

Of the four complete annual cycles of cantatas that Telemann published, Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in 1726,  is exceptional in its restricted scoring. Each cantata, consisting usually of two arias enclosing a lengthy recitative, calls for only one solo voice, one melody instrument, and basso continuo (usually consisting of a keyboard instrument with a melody instrument reinforcing the bass line). The reduced forces made the cycle suitable for smaller church choirs and even home performance. In his cantata recitatives and arias, Telemann drew on his experience as an opera composer so as to bring out the imagery and “affect” of  the sacred texts, another ability that endeared him to contemporary critics. As Exultemus general director (and soprano soloist) Shannon Canavin puts it, “Telemann had a unique gift for sensitive yet dynamic text setting, beautiful melodies, and colorful instrumental writing, which are uniquely showcased in his imaginative vocal works.”

The idea of performing an entire cycle of cantatas at their appropriate time in the liturgical calendar  originated with Newton Baroque’s director, organist and harpsichordist Andrus Madsen, who had already presented a number of Telemann’s vocal works, including the St. John Passion of 1737.  The collaboration with Exsultemus brings together some of the Boston area’s most accomplished singers and instrumentalists in a bold endeavor that is sure to put Telemann’s too-long neglected vocal works on the musical map.

See related review here.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Excellent diction and clear articulation by both choral and solo singers, reinforced by rhythmically sensitive playing from the orchestra, compelled us to renewed appreciation of the familiar  texts. Artfully assembled by Jennens from the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, many passages in the libretto were clearly chosen with an eye to their vivid  imagery and potential for musical pictorialism. Messiah is typically said to be contemplative rather than dramatic, yet the drama is there even in the absence of actual protagonists, and Pearlman’s direction was very effective in conveying a sense of progression between numbers and scenes. Thus the opening tenor recitative, “Comfort ye, my people,” ends with the voice crying in the wilderness, leading into the aria “Every valley shall be exalted.” Here tenor Keith Jameson’s ringing top notes and solid lower range, not to mention a beautifully executed cadenza, displayed Handel’s pictorial musical language to full advantage. The chorus “And the glory of the Lord” completed the sequence from Isaiah with sharply executed contrasts between contrapuntal and chordal declamation. More drama was in store with bass-baritone Kevin Deas’s entry as Lord of Hosts, followed by countertenor Matthew White’s aria “But who may abide the day of his coming,” beginning in a swinging siciliano but ending in the frenzied prestissimo of the “refiner’s fire.” Spontaneous applause broke out after the superbly executed chorus “For unto us a child is born” that concluded the first scene. Here Baroque violins, doubled by two Baroque oboes in exuberant roulades, sounded almost like clarino trumpets. In the “pifa” music that opened the second scene, strings and oboes and a hushed drone of organ and bass produced exquisite tone color in imitation of the shepherds’ rustic pipes and bagpipes, while offstage trumpets accompanied the angels’ choir. Amanda Forsythe, resplendent in Christmas scarlet, brought her effortless diction and agile coloratura to the fore in the “Daughter of Zion” aria,  and matched her tone beautifully to Matthew White’s in the two-part siciliano lullaby that followed. The choral fugue on “His yoke is easy” was delivered with a lightness that brought its every nuance to the fore.

Opening with a solemn chorus in French overture style, Part II ranged in mood from somber to enraged. In the da capo alto aria, the opening “He was despised,” with its pleading lovelorn echoes in the strings, contrasted with the relentless chords of the smiters in the middle section. Although often assigned to a female singer, the alto aria in particular seemed to benefit from the range and penetrating power of White’s countertenor. The Hallelujah Chorus at the close of Part II was suitably triumphant as trumpets and sharply articulate Baroque timpani joined in the celebration.

High points of  Part III included Forsythe’s exquisite rendering of  “I know that my Redeemer liveth” and the baritone aria “The Trumpet shall sound,” with its virtuoso obbligato played by Robinson Pyle. Avoiding the stentorian pomposity that sometimes mars this famous piece, Kevin Deas treated it as a true duet, matching the trumpet’s roulades with equivalent virtuosity and even turning away from the audience to focus his attention on the trumpet interludes. Like his fellow soloists, Deas treated repeated passages as new explorations rather than repetitions of the same material, inserting the kind of rhetorical flourishes that go beyond mere virtuosity and would have been expected by Handel’s audiences. The final chorus contrasted powerfully declamatory harmony with a rousing fugal conclusion.

There is no getting away from the fact that the message of Messiah’s libretto may have been intended as an affirmation of Christian belief, specifically of the Anglican persuasion. But clearly its meaning for the diverse audiences that know and love Handel’s setting goes beyond sectarian concerns to an affirmation of life itself and its intimations of immortality.

Virginia Newes, who now lives in Cambridge, was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Sunday’s program presented the latest incarnation of the Camerata’s “Sacred Bridge,” part of an ongoing effort to explore parallels between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim musics of the Middle Ages. The title itself harks back to a 1959 work by the Viennese-born scholar Eric Werner, who sought to link the chants of the synagogue with those of the early Christian church. Few scholars today subscribe to Werner’s thesis of continuity between Jewish and Gregorian melodies and psalm tones, and similar efforts to “match up” sketchily notated or unwritten melodies from different traditions — sacred or secular — are fraught with pitfalls. Another murky area of musical history concerns the instruments played by medieval musicians. Parts for instruments are never specified in the surviving manuscripts, and instruments were generally banned from places of worship. Very few of them survive, in fact, although we have a good idea of what they looked like from pictures and sculptures. But what did they sound like and what music did they play? Attempts to reconstruct medieval ensembles and their repertory by analogy with contemporary musical practices in North Africa and the Near East have enriched the medieval sound palette with exotic tonal color, but they have been treated with some skepticism by those who maintain  that most medieval monophonic song, particularly of the “high style” or elevated type, was sung in a freely declamatory rhythm and without instrumental accompaniment.

For Sunday’s program, the Camerata ensemble included Director Emeritus Joel Cohen, who played the lute and the gittern and occasionally joined in singing and recitation; singers Anne Azéma (who is also Artistic Director) and Michael Collver, who also played the cornetto; Jesse Lepkoff on flute and recorder; and Carol Lewis playing vielle and viola da gamba. They were joined by the three musicians of the Sharq Arabic Music Ensemble, singer and nay (end-blown flute) and percussion player Boujoumaa Razgui, ‘oud (lute) and voice from Mehmet Sanlikol, and director and percussionist Karim Nagi.

Transverse (western) flute and nay playing from the balcony introduced the first part of the program, “Songs of Exile,” which featured a Sephardic lament followed by Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon,” sung in Hebrew by Joel Cohen. The “Sacred Bridge” was represented by Latin and Hebrew versions of Psalm 114 and a “Eulogy of Moses” by Obadiah the Proselyte, a 12th-century Italian convert to Judaism. Imagined instrumental parts surrounded the vocal numbers with preludes or interludes or provided heterophonic accompaniments. These could be colorfully atmospheric, but at times the jingle-jangle of percussion was an unwelcome distraction. This was particularly the case in the trouvère song by Mathieu le Juif that opened the section on “Minority Minstrels in the Christian Middle Ages.” Anne Azéma’s ringing and unwaveringly focused delivery, expressive ornamentation, and convincing articulation showed her to be completely at home in this repertory; a dramatic highlight of the afternoon was her delivery of Mathieu’s nasty “envoi” to his lady (“May God make your face wrinkled and old!”) from the front of the stage. Unfortunately, the instrumental interludes only diminished the drama, successively re-orchestrated with each stanza until the entire band joined in at the end. A more restrained vielle drone accompanied countertenor Michael Collver’s evocative and compelling performance of a melancholy poem in Middle-High German by Sueskint von Trimberg, Collver, and Azéma. A section on Jewish Folksong of the Mediterranean concluded with a prayer of celebration on the Circumcision in Hebrew, sung in dialogue by Azéma and Collver, with Jesse Lepkoff’s flute providing an ornamented version of the simple melody.

Post-intermission, the program focused on “Mystical Spain.” Here the intent was to demonstrate intersections, indeed similarities, between songs of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, with polyglot performances of similar melodies both successively and simultaneously involving singers and instrumentalists of both the Camerata and the Sharq ensembles. Several numbers were taken from the monumental collection assembled in the mid-13th century by Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile and León. Their insistent rhythms (at least in this interpretation) contrasted with the formulaic chant of a passage from the Koran, beautifully rendered by Boujoumaa Razgui. Azéma led the group in an exuberant finale based on a traditional Arabo-Andalusian dawn prayer, topping it off with a suitably virtuosic melisma (the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession). Two rousing encores in Arabic and Ladino underscored the program’s theme of cultural harmony.

Although some of the Camerata’s mixtures came close to being “over the top,” we can be grateful to them for bringing the music of divergent cultures to our attention in vibrant performances. Let’s hope we soon have the chance to hear a complete program of Arabic music by the Sharq Ensemble.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Masterful singing by baritone Douglas Williams as Aeneas (André Costantini photo)

In its most ambitious chamber opera performance so far, the Boston Early Music Festival presented Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory on Saturday evening, November 27, and Sunday afternoon, November 28. This review is of Sunday’s performance.

Performed many times over the past few decades and available in some fifty-odd recordings, Purcell’s familiar work is actually a problematic musical torso in need of reconstruction. Its earliest documented performance took place in 1688 at a girls’ finishing school in Chelsea, but the opera may well have been performed earlier as a court masque for Charles II or James II. All we have to go on is the libretto printed for the school performance and the earliest surviving musical score, a manuscript copy dating from around 1775. In preparing this performance, musical directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs and stage director Gilbert Blin decided to restore the “opera” to its courtly masque context, with courtiers as attendants and participants. Since no music exists for the surviving prologue, they chose one of Purcell’s extended “Welcome Odes” for Charles II in its stead and added as Epilogue part of another Ode for James II. The printed libretto also specifies several dances for which no music has survived. Four dances were borrowed from other theatrical works by Purcell, while the two lively “gitter” dances drew on music by the court guitarist to Charles II. Stubbs completed the second act himself with a setting in Purcell’s style of a witches’ text for which no music has survived.

Among superb singers were Annie Rosen, Laura Pudwell (Dido), José Lemos, Yulia Van Doren, and Thea Lobo (foreground, l-r) (André Costantini photo)

The elaborate Prologue, a French-style complex of short airs, choruses, and dances, featured a full cast of poets and harvesters as well as allegorical and mythological personages. Act I introduced the principal characters of the tragedy, based on a famous episode from Virgil’s Aeneid. Mezzo soprano Laura Pudwell was a resplendent Dido, especially moving in her ground-bass aria, “Peace and I are strangers grown,” while soprano Yulia Van Doren sparkled with Baroque agility as the ever optimistic Belinda. Nothing prepared us for the startling appearance at the beginning of the second act of tenor Jason McStoots as the sorceress, encased in an enormous black hoop skirt, out from which crawled a spirit later to appear as the false Mercury. The frantic singing and dancing of the devils in their Hallowe’en-candy costumes, wittily choreographed by Melinda Sullivan, provided a comic foil to the tragedy to follow. The Grove Scene centered on the second of the three ground-bass arias, one in each act, that represented emotional high points of the tragedy. Beautifully sung by soprano Teresa Wakim, the aria starts off in a straightforward manner, keeping pace with the repetitive accompaniment but gradually departs from its regular phrasing as the heartrending tale of Acteon is told, first in words, then in a mimed masque expertly danced by Caroline Copeland as Diana and Carlos Fittante as Acteon. The remainder of the act belongs to Aeneas, who enters as triumphant hunter only to resign himself abjectly to the false Mercury’s command to abandon Carthage and his beloved Dido. In depicting these changing moods, baritone Douglas Williams showed his mastery of Purcell’s expressive recitative style. The opening of Act III juxtaposes the “boozy” sailors and the triumphant witches, more comic relief before the angry confrontation between Dido and Aeneas. Dido’s dying lament has inspired a multitude of composers, but no setting is more moving than Purcell’s, with its anguished cry set against a relentless passacaglia bass. Most performances of Dido end with the cupids’ chorus “With drooping wings,” but O’Dette and Stubbs fittingly added a dance for the cupids, borrowing a minuet from the ode for James II, “Why are all the Muses mute,” which led directly into the second part of the ode, serving as Epilogue. After a first round of applause, we were treated to an “encore” in the form of a delightfully rustic song-and-dance number, “Harvest Home,” from Purcell’s King Arthur.

The placement on stage of the BEMF virtuoso chamber ensemble of harpsichord, two violins, viola, cello, and two lutes (alternating with guitars), with violinist Robert Mealy and lutenist Paul O’Dette in the lead, seemed perfectly in keeping with the courtly chamber setting. Expert singers and instrumentalists, imaginative staging, elegant Baroque dancing, stunning costumes — all the delights we have come to expect from Boston Early Music Festival productions — were on display in this wonderful performance.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Abbess, herbalist and writer on medical and scientific topics, poet and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179, also called Hildegard von Bingen) was also a composer whose settings of religious poetry, both lyrical and dramatic, have survived in two large manuscripts from the late twelfth century. Intended for performance by the nuns of the community she founded and led, the Play of the Virtues depicts the struggle between the Devil and sixteen personified Virtues for possession of the human Soul (Anima). As explained in a succinct introduction by LeClair and also visible in a giant-size copy of the manuscript that served as a backdrop to the performance, the music is notated on four-line staves in neumes that indicate pitch and text placement but not note durations. Sparse rubrics (annotations in red ink) identify the protagonists but give neither stage directions nor suggestions for harmonization or  instrumental accompaniment of the melodies. Although instruments were not permitted in churches until late in the Middle Ages, members of monastic communities did play them, and they might have accompanied a performance in a refectory or other common area of a convent. In this performance, a vielle (medieval fiddle) and a harp, joined occasionally by LeClair on the symphonia (medieval hurdy-gurdy) provided reinforcement to the choir and occasional (invented) instrumental interludes. Practiced from the early Middle Ages, vocal organum — doubling of chant melodies at the fifth and/or the octave, or by a drone on a single pitch — added sonic variety to the ensemble singing. A more surprising feature of this performance, perhaps, was the costuming of the singers. Was the decision to dress them in contemporary civilian clothing rather than in nuns’ garb inspired by the fact that members of Hildegard’s community of nuns from aristocratic families occasionally adorned themselves with fine clothes and jewelry? Or was the intent to present the personified virtues as down-to-earth humans rather than abstractions?

Hildegard’s highly formulaic yet wide-ranging melodic lines sometimes span more than two octaves, and while largely syllabic, they also contain elaborate melismatic ornamentation that calls for well-trained singers. The Cappella Clausura ensemble of eight singers and four soloists was more than up to the task. Precise intonation, clear tone, but above all excellent diction provided the flexible rhythmic articulation essential to bring these melodies to life. Although provided with scores, these singers appeared to have internalized the music and learned to cue each other to the extent that only minimal conducting gestures, often mere cues, were required from LeClair. Soloists Laura Betinis as Anima, with Daniela Tosic and Lori Brannen Chang as the principal virtues of Humility and Chastity, provided differentiated vocal color along with stylistic consistency, while Leah Hungerford was a suitably triumphant Victoria as she and the Virtues finally subdued the red-shirted Devil (a spoken part played by Margaret Raines).

As its name indicates, Cappella Clausura specializes in music sung by cloistered women. The Ordo Virtutum is an important part of that repertoire, and apart from its historical interest, a work to be valued on its own. With the plethora of New Age and rock reinterpretations of Hildegard’s music on the market, we are lucky to have a group like Cappella Clausura to demonstrate just how beautiful this music can be.

Virginia Newes lives in Cambridge. She was Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.