San Francisco Classical Voice

The highlight of the concert was Paul Hindemith's Mass, written in 1963, just months before he died. Kula turbocharged this already delicious masterpiece, turning it into a liturgical re-creation interspersing chants — Gregorian propers for the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25 — with the movements of Hindemith's composition. The product of this blend of old and new was a definitive success, the chant giving the dense, intellectual writing of Hindemith's Mass room to breathe and giving the audience time to absorb its meaning. It also gave the singers a break from what must have been extremely difficult music to perform.

The Introit chant began ethereally with tenors and basses in a well-blended unison, setting up Hindemith's Kyrie as sopranos came in, and then the other parts joined one by one, each line peeling off layers of musical meaning. Lush dissonances spun upward, the singers calling out repeatedly in the "Christe" section, then falling away into a low alto drone. Finally the tenors remained all alone. Pacific Collegium infused the Gloria with a full, rich sound, even though the music confounds the ablest singer to stay on pitch. A densely chorded "Amen" supplied the climax of cascading, ringing lines. Later, the Sanctus presented a formidable pitch terrain in which most choirs would have stumbled badly, but the ensemble held up until the Agnus Dei, where minor pitch problems caused Kula to subtly repitch the choir. The piece ended on a chord that finally resolved the accumulated tension that Hindemith had so solidly architected.

Soprano Tania d'Amelio's solo in the Gradual chant had a warm purity of tone that was captivating. Throughout, the interior alto and tenor parts shimmered against the soprano melody, which sometimes overly dominated the sound. Occasionally, pitches on the high end of the soprano range didn't always match each other, especially amid the glissandos. The basses and sopranos were also sometimes not as unified as they could have been on the chant, and overall in the chant the singers could have been more nuanced in hypnotically propelling the line forward.

Despite the exertions of this fine group, the musical offering of the second half felt less than satisfying after the first half's fare. Britten's Sacred and Profane was composed for his partner Peter Pears' a cappella group, the Wilbye Consort. It mixes both sacred and profane sentiments with eight medieval texts, written in Middle English, to form a mishmash of styles and influences not altogether coherent. Strange glissandos combine with tight, dissonant harmonies. A carol section toys with the form, then breaks down in a somewhat awkward repetition of lines about "primerole" (primrose) and "chelde water" (cold water). The piece achieves transcendence in "Ye that pasen by" and the section's repetitive, descending lines, before ending abruptly with a glissando. What is it about glissandos — that often cheesy-sounding device, to this singer's ears — that so captured the imagination of these composers?

The Requiem, written in 1989 by Italian composer Sandro Gorli, ended the set with more of a whimper than a bang. Gorli replaces the usual text of the Mass for the dead with his own highly personal supplications. Textual meaning is obliterated as the syllables of words are split up among various singers, their individual sounds popping out of the dissonant texture like rubber bands. (Again, what's with the glissandos?) It was disconcerting to see the singers repeatedly steady themselves with their own tuning forks as the pitch center swirled around them. Individual lines slid past each other like melting butter. The piece seemed to have no direction, which was probably the postmodern intent, and was as atmospheric in its Arvo Pärt-like drones as it was random in its outbursts. But perhaps that's the message of this piece: Individuals may stand out bravely, but they are ultimately alone in their own worlds and too often subsumed beneath a collective chaos.

The choir ended with a musical joke of sorts, Ecce quomodo moritur justus, a piece by Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th century nobleman who had his wife and her lover murdered, got away with it, and then spent the rest of his life writing strange, tortured music that modern composers like Stravinsky adored. With its weird, unstable harmonies, chattering voices, and moments of not-quite-textbook Renaissance transcendence, it was as though Gesualdo was prefiguring Gorli, only with some structure, which is an odd thing to say about Gesualdo. In all, it was a fitting conclusion to a most enjoyable, if otherwordly, afternoon.