In an increasingly crowded field of Bay Area choral ensembles, the three-year-old Artists' Vocal Ensemble (AVE) manages to stand out from the pack. One of its distinctions is director Jonathan Dimmock's commitment to social justice, as demonstrated by his latest concert set, a benefit for the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance. Equally important, Dimmock assembled for this concert a roster of 13 high-caliber singers, who produced an extremely polished choral sound. His program of sacred music from masters of the late Renaissance, performed Friday at San Francisco's St. Ignatius Church, offered a wealth of glorious singing and further cemented the ensemble's status as a key player on the choral scene.
Anyone who thinks all Renaissance music sounds similar need only compare Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso, the two main figures on the concert program. Contemporaries in age, the two composers had vastly different sensibilities. Palestrina was the elegant conservative, producing finely polished gems, while Lasso was the inventive polyglot, conveying more viscerally the emotional aspects of a text. It is to AVE's credit that its interpretations of both composers' music accentuated these characteristic differences, never leaving doubt as to which composer was being performed.
The pure beauty and elegance of AVE's sound shone most brightly in the program's centerpiece, Palestrina's renowned
Missa Papae Marcellae (Pope Marcellus Mass). The opening Kyrie was a delight, featuring wonderfully shaped melodic lines and vivid dynamic contrasts. A brisk opening tempo for the Gloria blurred some of the more rapidly moving melodies, but as the tempo relaxed in the second half, AVE recaptured its luxuriant sound.
Lush Sanctus
The ensemble's deft handling of contrasts in the Credo was exceptional. It never lost intensity across wide-ranging shifts in dynamic and vocal ranges. A lush panoply of intermingling melodies in the Sanctus, rising and falling like oscillating waves, gave this movement impressive power. The closing Agnus Dei had a wonderful ebb-and-flow quality, with different textures emerging and receding amid a background of lustrous sonority.
Smaller groups drawn from within AVE were more hit-or-miss. The male ensemble offered a moving and sensitive performance of Palestrina's
Ave Maria, an unusually sober setting of this famous anthem text. The mystical
Miserere mei (Have mercy upon me) of Gregorio Allegri, alternating between chant, solo quartet, and ensemble sections, was an ambitious opener to the program, but its moments of beauty were marred by insecure entrances and faulty intonation. The program's one real lapse was Lasso's
Hodie completi sunt (On this day are fulfilled), a paean to Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. The seven voices never congealed as an ensemble, but faltered in blend and struggled with more wobbly intonation.
Several other Lasso pieces produced an abundance of high drama.
Taedet animam meam (My soul is weary) was wonderfully expressive. Its opening motive alternately falls and rises as a vivid representation of the text's affect. AVE captured the sense of weariness in this text without ever sounding weary itself.
Salve Regina (Hail, queen of heaven) is an unusually insistent setting of the hymn, laden with rapid textural changes. AVE's ability to differentiate these sections while maintaining the integrity of their overall sound was admirable.
Res neque ([Love is a] thing risen), a solemn meditation on the nobility of heavenly love, began with stately grace before moving to a more insistent, harmonically enriched concluding section. The closing motet,
Benedictio (Blessing), was a vibrant, fanfarelike piece whose cascading lines were an unabashed depiction of fervent praise to God. The performances of both were rock-solid.
Dimmock approaches his concert sets with obvious care, and his fluid conducting style is a natural fit for the elongated melodies of Renaissance polyphony. Certain accoutrements to the concert, however, bordered on the distracting. The dramatic readings of excerpts from Dante's
Inferno were difficult to understand in St. Ignatius' cavernous acoustic (despite a passionate delivery from reader Stephen McDermott Myers). Other details, such as failing to include original Latin texts for pieces in the program, required greater attentiveness.