NEW YORK — For better or for worse, the sacred polyphony of 16th-century Rome has become synonymous with cool, cerebral, contrapuntal construction. Josquin des Prez’s complex imitative writing casts a long shadow over the history of Western composition, while the clear and elegant Counter-Reformation writing of Palestrina has fueled generations of music theory homework assignments.
Fortunately, the repertoire has champions like Rory McCleery and his chamber choir, The Marian Consort, to demonstrate the music’s range and depth beyond the intellectual accomplishments of its canonical composers. On Feb. 14, the eight-part Consort’s program “City of Echoes: Rome in the 16th Century” brought to life works by Josquin, Palestrina, Orlande de Lassus, and Tomás Luis de Victoria, and — more exciting still — by such practitioners as Vicente Lusitano and Jean Mouton, whose music has suffered almost half a millennium of unjust neglect.
While The Marian Consort presented their recital under the auspices of Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, they sang instead at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, located just off Times Square. Popularly known as “Smoky Mary’s” for its incense-heavy worship services, this Episcopal church in the Anglo-Catholic tradition proved both acoustically and thematically appropriate for a Marian Consort program heavy with Marian motets. St. Mary’s ornate interior lent to the ambience as well, its lapis-blue ceiling spangled with gilt stars.
Between sets of choral movements, performed without intermission, McCleery took to the lectern and gave the gray and stylish audience informal introductions that illuminated the lives, compositional strategies, and historical milieus of the various composers. Mouton earned his name by being as mild as a lamb; Ghiselin Danckerts was kicked out of the Papal choir for having “no voice.”
The Consort’s actual performance, however, leaned away from the warm humanity of these introductions, and even away from the historical context of these works, to offer interpretations that instead built on what musicologist Richard Taruskin identified as the modernist tendencies of the 20th-century early-music movement.
While in the Rome of their time the composers might have heard these works with continuo accompaniment, on this occasion each piece was sung a cappella, with one or two singers — but mostly one — to a part and little to no vibrato. McCleery’s tempos chugged along with a Glenn Gould-like steadiness, applying rubato only where absolutely necessary. At a few points, this critic cast his eyes towards that vaulted ceiling rather than watch the conductor, whose simple, quasi-metronomic pattern unintentionally distracted from the immaculately rehearsed choir’s long, finely shaped phrases.
But this is the pettiest, most superficial complaint one could make about a performance of such rigor. The substance lay in that fine phrasing: Without lingering tempos or vocal flash, the choir explored the expressive possibilities of the music using only the most delicate dynamic swells. It was easy to hear how such a spare approach became the standard for specialists in this repertoire, as the transparent sound allowed the audience to peer deep into the layers of each work.
This was pure chamber music, a dialogue between equal voices, each singer emerging to highlight important musical figures before disappearing again into a well-blended sonic whole. The inner voices were especially rich, with alto Sophie Overin bringing a special brightness to her low notes, though tenor Daniel Lewis — a bit breathy — was more effective as a part of the choral texture than as a soloist.
The Consort’s tightly focused aesthetic illuminated the celebrated contrapuntal architecture of the best-known pieces on the program, starting with the imitative, four-part Ave Maria of Josquin. A number of the selections, McCreely pointed out, looked back towards Josquin: Lusitano’s Inviolata nods to the earlier composer’s setting, while the Kyrie from Palestrina’s Missa Benedicta es quotes Josquin’s Benedicta es motet. (Palestrina returned later on the program with the Gloria from his Missa in Papae Marcelli, a load-bearing pillar of the classical canon, presented here in a lush, antiphonal eight-part arrangement by Francesco Soriano.)
But some of the most stirring pieces were not quite so famous. The striking opening of Ghiselin Danckerts’ Laetamini in Domino proved perfectly suited to The Marian Consort’s austere, lucid sound, while it seems impossible to discuss Jean Mouton’s quadruple canon Ave Maria gemma virginum without wordplay: It is, undeniably, a perfectly cut little gem, scintillating and dazzling as each facet is revealed. The title of this program notwithstanding, Mouton never worked in Rome, but one should welcome any excuse to hear this thrilling motet.
Victoria is hardly a forgotten composer, but the soaring lines and moving cadences of his eight-part Ave regina caelorum reflect an affective language, ranging here from wonder to jubilation, that speaks to the soul of the 21st-century listener with a power far out of proportion to his contemporary renown. Just as potent is the music of Vicente Lusitano, a forward-looking Portuguese music theorist and composer whose near-total obscurity today might, McCleery suggests, owe something to the limited opportunities for social advancement available to a composer of African ancestry. Certainly the mesmerizing fluidity and loveliness of his Regina caeli laetare and Inviolata, as brought to life by the Consort, made it clear that his musical skills were not to blame.
Just before the concert-closing Inviolata, McCleery jokingly boasted that any piece on the program could have served as a finale to the recital, and he was right — but the pull of Lusitano’s finely braided piece, another response to a Josquin motet, was especially irresistible. Followed by an encore of Ave virgo caeli porta, a brief but exquisite Marian bonbon by Mouton, it completed the sense that this precise, keenly focused performance of a very specific choral repertoire had, in its subtleties, illuminated a whole musical world.
