NEW YORK —Polyphonic Postcards, the program the UK-based choir Stile Antico brought to Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on Oct. 15, began close to home but immediately embarked on a grand tour of sacred and secular Renaissance polyphony, with a 21st-century stop in America for good measure. Their journey may have taken them, occasionally, beyond their comfort zone, but each missive to the audience was backed by music-making of painterly splendor.
The tempos were surprisingly brisk for such a cathedral-esque acoustic, especially for a choir that performs without the safety nets of conductor or accompanist. They took the “Loquebantur variis linguis” of their countryman Thomas Tallis at a joyous, dance-like pace, so that its imitative entries immediately wove themselves tightly into an almost impenetrable mass of voices — a sonic representation of the polyglot Pentecost described in the text. But individual notes leapt out of the texture to emphasize the surprising dissonances, reminding the audience that this was not early music as easy listening but a work of piquant and satisfying strangeness.
The printed program identified the tour’s first stop as Paris, where the audience was greeted by a suitably florid “Mater floreati” by Pierre Moulu: as joyous as the Tallis but light where the “Loquebantur” was vigorous. For Claudin de Sermisy’s homophonic chanson “Tant que vivray,” the 12-voice choir was reduced to four. While one could imagine a quartet of 16th-century amateurs gathering socially to sing its simpler textures, Stile Antico phrased each line with refinement, measuring out their breaths like lengths of viol bow.
A little less refinement would have suited Clement Janequin’s “Les cris de Paris,” which turns the choir into a cacophony of street vendors, competing for attention as they hawk their wares. There were a few moments of truly shameless mugging, but they could have gotten away with quite a few more — and should have. This is a funny piece by a funny composer, but its rough edges were sanded off by the church’s airy acoustic and the choir’s predisposition toward loveliness of sound.
That loveliness served them well on the tour’s Seville stop, however, where they showcased the Roman polyphony of Spanish composers Francisco Guerrero and Alonso Lobo. Stile Antico’s intonation can get a little sweaty at times — falling a bit short on some of the soaring melodic lines and almost imperceptibly tuning some chords after they’ve already landed on them — but they know how to shape a vocal phrase for maximum expressivity without overdoing it, lending a real sense of awe to their cadences.
Those soaring melodies gave way to jollier melismas in Munich’s “Fratres, sobrii estote à 8” by Ludwig Daser and Orlande de Lassus’ amiable, secular five-part “Es jagt ein Jäger.” Before heading on to Rome, the choir gave a merry account of Ludwig Senfl’s “Das Geläut zu Speyer,” a companion piece to Janequin’s “Les cris” in that this musical depiction of Munich’s church bells explicitly attempts to render the sounds of the city through music.
When in Rome, the chorus used a pair of motets — “Christus factus est” by Felice Anerio and “Tu es Petrus” by Palestrina — to bookend a madrigal by Philippe Verdelot. Solemnity reigned in the Anerio, whose polyphony did not so much weave itself as waft itself, like incense, into the arches overhead, à la Allegri’s “Miserere.” By the end of Verdelot’s “Trist’Amarilli mia,” performed by a solo quartet, this pastoral allegory of the destruction of Rome proved the most affecting piece on the program, thanks to the powerful vocal performances of the quartet, especially the mighty alto of Cara Curren.
By contrast, in Stile Antico’s rock-solid performance, Palestrina’s pious motet seemed to have more in common with the earthy Bavarian lieder. This was one of the many little delights offered by the high-concept programming: the way in which the audience was able to trace the threads of unexpected aesthetic commonalities between sacred and secular polyphony, or Central and Mediterranean Europe.
The tour ended just after Venice, where the audience was greeted by an exquisite account of Monteverdi’s “Adoremus te Christe.” Stile Antico brought out its moving richness, just as the singers did in shaping the lines of Claudio Merulo’s “Vergine madre” as carefully and as gracefully as if they were carving the Virgin’s garments in wood. Finally, the full complement of singers gave a spectacular rendition of Andrea Gabrieli’s “Ecco Vinegia bella à 12,” their sense of pacing and drama — and their sheer vocal power — giving Venice’s signature antiphonal style the sonic brilliance it deserves.
Our tour’s final destination? Washington, D.C. American composer Christopher Cerrone’s “It looks quite curious” sets a letter from a skeptical Walt Whitman on the occasion of his trip to the Capitol Building, when the statue of Freedom atop its rotunda was still brand-new. If Stile Antico deserves special credit, as Renaissance music specialists, for commissioning a new piece of music, it deserves still more for performing a piece that pushed the choir to its limits.
Cerrone is a composer unafraid of loveliness, but his music often draws its dramatic power from an internal tension against the geometric severity of its lines, the metronomic regularity of its pulses, and the strict, narrow gamut of its pitch materials. “It looks quite curious” begins by layering short loops, gradually opening up sonically until it reaches ominous climaxes whose demands on range, intonation — a stack of dissonance suddenly becomes a stack of octaves — and volume brought the choir to the very edge of shrillness. This is not, in other words, a piece built primarily out of soaring legato melodies and warm harmonies, to flatter Stile Antico’s rounded sonorities and fluidity of phrasing.
Instead, one might compare it to a pair of unlikely siblings on the program, those pieces by Janequin and Senfl, with their overlapping musical loops, although this score represented not street vendors or cathedral bells but the workings of a beautiful machine that was even more broken in Whitman’s time than it is today.
Cerrone and the chorus were both greeted by thunderous applause at the conclusion of their program, whose encore was a return to London: John Dowland’s “Now o now I needs must part.” Stile Antico brought a sprightliness to the melancholy part song so that this last postcard felt less like an adieu and more like an au revoir.
