Conjuring militant visions of the Apocalypse, vocal ensemble Blue Heron captivated a nearly full house at First Church Cambridge on Saturday and earned an immediate standing ovation with its spellbinding rendition of Johannes Regis’s Missa L’homme armé/Dum sacrum mysterium. The afternoon concert “The Armed Archangel” featured Regis’s mass setting alongside motets and chants celebrating the archangel St. Michael. In collaboration with NEC musicologist Sean Gallagher (who was present) Blue Heron artistic director Scott Metcalfe crafted a program that placed Regis’s Mass in an imagined recreation of its original context. In the early 1460s, Regis composed the work for the feast of St. Michael at Cambrai Cathedral in Northern France where Regis worked in the diocese of Cambrai around the same time as Guillaume Dufay. In evoking this setting, Metcalfe and Gallagher showed the fruitful possibilities of collaboration between musicologists and musicians, although this is certainly not Blue Heron’s first foray into such a partnership.
The ensemble’s recreation of the festal procession centered on the “Station before the image,” that is, the celebration of Mass in front of an image of St. Michael, in this case an enlargement of the center panel of Hans Memling’s Triptych with the Last Judgment (1467-71). The singers began from the back of the chancel with Philippe de Monte’s motet Factum est silentium in coelo before processing around the sanctuary chanting solemnly as they went. They passed slowly down the aisle and behind the audience before returning to the front. Once there, they arrayed in a semicircle before the image, their voices ringing out forcefully in unison the anonymous secular song which Regis employed as a cantus firmus in his Mass—L’homme armé. The “armed man” tune represents not only the most popular cantus firmus melody in the Renaissance—with over 40 mass settings—but also the conspicuous commingling of the sacred and secular in the 15th century. Adding to this, Regis also infused his setting with multiple chant melodies associated with St. Michael. Metcalfe’s printed essay contends that the medieval listener likely would have appreciated a connection between the unnamed “armed man” of the secular song and the archangel St. Michael, thus explaining Regis’s choice of this tune for the feast of St. Michael.
Following the L’homme armé song, Blue Heron moved quickly to a semicircle of music stands to intone the Mass, now facing the audience instead of the image. Metcalfe fleshed it out with an Introit chant and an Offertory motet by Jacotin (possibly Jacotin Frontin, d. 1516?), Michaele archangele paradisi praeposite. But Regis’s Mass itself allowed Blue Heron to demonstrate their much-appreciated precision and subtlety. In keeping with the Flemish origins of this music, the choir followed French Latin diction throughout, their vowels sitting further forward and narrow, especially u. This focused their sound and allowed it to cut through the space even up to my seat in the balcony. A large, resonant room like the First Church sanctuary might drown a small choir in unwanted echoes, but here, they skillfully navigated this challenge to maximize the effectiveness of their vowels and articulation. In addition, they achieved exceptional ensemble despite the complete independence of each vocal line in the polyphonic textures. Frequent eye contact among the singers and almost dancelike swaying enabled the choir to cohere fluently.
Yet, it was in the occasional duets in Regis’s Mass we truly experienced the professionalism and musicality of the group. Regis sets a number of portions of the Mass text, scattered through the five main sections of the Mass Ordinary, as duets between cantus and tenor parts. Specifically, this occurs in the “Qui tollis” of the Gloria, “Et resurrexit” in the Credo, “Benedictus” in the Sanctus, and the second “Agnus dei.” In each case, the composer placed these duets carefully to highlight certain middle portions of the text of each section that are crucial to the theological thrust of the passage. Blue Heron divided these duets with rotating pairings of singers from among the soprano and tenor members including mezzo-soprano Kim Leeds, countertenor Timothy Parsons, and tenors Jason McStoots and Jonas Budris. In each permutation of pairs, voices intertwined to illuminate Regis’s ornate polyphony with tremendous adroitness.
The ensemble also exhibited considerable stamina over more than an hour of continuous singing. The only break came halfway through just after the Credo, as they stepped away from their stands to take quick sips of water. While not every work on the concert required the whole choir, at least six of the ten total vocalists (including Metcalfe during the processions) sang at any given time.
Following the last movement of the Mass, the imaginative recreation concluded with a chanted procession back to the starting place for a final motet, Henricus Isaac’s Angeli archangeli. Its lively rhythms evoked a breathless anticipation of the end of days, maybe encompassing the medieval view of the Apocalypse as precursor to paradise rather than the modern depictions of a societal collapse. Despite its small numbers, Blue Heron sonically revealed the image from the book of Revelations of the milia milium, the “thousands upon thousands,” that serve St. Michael according to the chants that Regis’s mass references. As the concert drew to a close, the early setting winter sunlight which had been streaming through the stained glass of First Church’s sanctuary dwindled to a single panel in the back of the chancel, as if the Apocalypse had indeed arrived.