Music of the Baroque ends season with glowing array of sacred polyphony

Music of the Baroque returned to its roots with an intelligently planned, engagingly performed season finale Monday night at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church.

Principal guest conductor Nicholas Kraemer led the chorus and instrumentalists in a program of Baroque and Renaissance polyphony that harkened to the organization’s origins some 54 years ago as a professional exemplar of choral music in area churches.

Fourth Presbyterian was the ideal space acoustically and architecturally for a stylistically varied program—sung in Latin, English, German and French—that moved from the luminous austerity of Byrd, Palestrina and Purcell through the exultant majesty of Monteverdi to a grand motet by J.S. Bach that synthesized the polyphonic achievements of his musical forebears.

The church was filled to capacity, with audience members reserving special appreciation for the excellent 26-member chorus and their expert chorus director, Andrew Megill. The candle-lit altar and black robes of the choristers as they processed from the back of the nave at the outset lent an additional sense of dignified devotion to the concert.

The economy of means and meditative serenity shared by a Missa brevis of Palestrina and Byrd’s motet Ave verum corpus displayed contrasting aspects of sacred polyphony of 16th and 17th century Catholic Church music, respectively. Kraemer divided the Palestrina mass into three parts of two sections each, its slow-moving choral lines anchoring each half of the program like musical stations of the Cross.

The Byrd (1635) was particularly fascinating as an example of recusant choral Catholicism in Anglican England, the dissonant suspensions giving this prayer an inward-looking spirituality that spoke across five centuries. Seamless blending of voices and transparency of texture marked the performances of the Palestrina and Byrd works.

No greater expressive contrast could be imagined than the Purcell anthem Rejoice in the Lord Alway, which marries Anglican textual clarity with Baroque elan, accompanied by the bell-like sounds of the instrumental accompaniment. The dialoguing of chorus soloists Chelsea Lyons, Tim Lambert and Stephen Richardson with the larger chorus was nicely achieved.

No Baroque sacred choral travelogue would be complete without the color and zest of Monteverdi, and the master’s motet Beatus vir brought forth an exultant concertato conversation between voices and instruments. Kraemer and friends made brisk yet never rushed work of this miniature musical gem, their antiphonal exchanges alert to textual tone-painting, full of rhythmic vitality.
A brief musical detour in the form of the 20th century French romantic Joseph Noyon’s warmly attractive, Rameau-derived Hymn to the Night preceded the culminating Bach Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied.

This great motet (1726) impressed no less than Mozart with its inspired fusion of rigorous contrapuntal craftsmanship and Lutheran spiritual fervor. Monday’s reading soared on the strength of clear, crisply articulated choral lines—a lucid yet full sound firmly undergirded by the instrumental ensemble. The solo vocal quartet, with Katherine Buzard joining the above-mentioned MOB Chorus singers, acquitted itself equally well.

Seven leading instrumentalists from the MOB Orchestra rounded out the program with nimble renditions of a Purcell trio sonata and Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D Major, presented here with its companion Gigue that most audience members probably had never heard before.

The concert was given in tribute to the distinguished bass Jan Jarvis, who is retiring after 53 seasons as a member of the MOB Chorus.