BOSTON - What are the chances of hearing music by Jacques Arcadelt in consecutive concerts by two different groups? Pretty good, it seems, if you’re at the Boston Early Music Festival.
The renowned Hilliard Ensemble, a male vocal quartet, performed three settings of Petrarch poems by Arcadelt on Friday night in a festival concert of secular and sacred works at Emmanuel Church called “A Hilliard Songbook.†And Convivium Musicum, a chorus conducted by Michael Barrett, sang a lovely “Ave Maria†by Arcadelt (here, as often, called Jacob) on Saturday afternoon in a Fringe festival program at the Church of St. John the Evangelist called “Brahms and Early Music.â€
Not that Arcadelt, an accomplished Franco-Flemish composer of the 16th century, was anything special. In the teeming schedules of the two festivals it might have easily been many another minor master, now obscure.
The Hilliard program was loaded with them: Eustache de Monte Regali, Bernardo Pisano, St. Godric of Finchale, Sheryngham, John Plummer. I wish there were more reason to dwell on this concert, but there is strong reason not to.
Given the main festival’s theme this year, “Youth: Genius and Folly,†you might have hoped that featuring the ensemble represented a sort of canny counter-programming, designed to show that experience, too, has its place. If so, the demonstration failed.
It pains me â€" a longtime follower of the ensemble, especially through their many excellent recordings â€" to report that some of the voices are not aging well. Much of the artistry seemed intact, but sonority and control were often not.
The effect was so dire that I would have left at intermission if the program had not ended with a personal favorite never heard in live performance, Perotin’s “Viderunt Omnes,†which the ensemble recorded so beautifully. That beauty suddenly seemed a distant memory.
The Convivium concert offered instant balm, as the chorus filled the small church with rich, vital sound in Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Beata Es Virgo.†The group consists of amateurs, 19 of them on this occasion, exceptionally well trained by Mr. Barrett.
Mr. Barrett also evidently has a knack for programming. In this concert he drew on Renaissance and Baroque music found in Brahms’s wide-ranging music library, limiting the scope further to include only works that Brahms held in manuscript copies, rather than published editions, on the plausible theory that these probably meant the most to him.
Here, too, Arcadelt shared company with other obscure composers â€" Johann Eccard, Johann Walter, Johann Rudolf Ahle, Jacob Handl - among some more familiar. This brief survey suggested that Brahms favored music of warmth and complexity: no surprise there.
The program included arrangements of the hymn “Es Ist Genug†by Bach and Ahle, and it ended with Brahms’s “O Heiland Reiss die Himmel Auf,†a work seemingly modeled after Bach’s chorale cantatas. Only here, in a difficult work placed last, did the chorus show a bit of understandable fatigue and strain. For the most part, Mr. Barrett’s troops did themselves proud.
