More polyphony for Christmas

The young singers of Stile Antico.

Last weekend I got a double whammy of medieval and Renaissance polyphony - I caught the chart-topping Stile Antico (above) at the Boston Early Music Festival the night after I heard Boston's own Blue Heron.

And, like a few other people, I found the contrast didn't flatter the better-known band.

This is my second encounter with the Stile Antico kids (sorry, they just seem so young and earnest) - and this was also the second time I left scratching my head after one of their concerts.  It's not that they aren't often quite good - they are, not to mention super-serious about sacred music and polyphony, and so awkwardly genteel that sometimes, during one of their tweedy "Ladies-and-gentlemen-might-I-beg-of-you-a-moment-of-your-time" interludes, I felt myself suppressing an affectionate giggle.

And yet, I have to say Stile Antico can be a little dull in long doses, even though one facet of their performances - the soprano line, handled mostly by two women who must be sisters  (they share a surname) - is almost too focused and powerful for the profile of the rest of the group.  (Which makes me wonder if couple-dom and other relationships figure in the rest of the line-up as much as vocal talent does - there's a faintly in-bred, college-campus air about these guys.)

Those sopranos - Helen and Kate Ashby (along with Rebecca Hickey) - may be the group's only clear artistic signature, but you can't deny they command attention: these ladies boast a combination of perfect pitch, pure tone, and pure power that I don't think I've heard anywhere else; listening to them, you do wonder whether this might be how the angels sound (and no doubt their intensity is what drew the attention of Sting, with whom Stile Antico has toured).  Still, these ladies inevitably, and repetitively, tip every piece in their own direction (there are some good voices among the tenors, but elsewhere things are variable) - and that's not really the idea behind polyphony.  Sorry, it's just not.

There was one great exception to this general rule in last Saturday's concert - Tallis's Videte miraculum, from his Christmas Mass, Missa Puer natus est, written for the crazily-Catholic Queen Mary, back in the days when England was schizophrenically swinging back and forth between the Anglican and Catholic churches.  For a Christmas mass, Puer natus est is a little melancholic (in one of those strange resonances between art and life, it was written when Queen Mary imagined she was pregnant - only she wasn't); but one of the great things about Tallis is the way his vocal works delineate gigantic sonic architectures - rather like the cathedrals in which they were often sung - and for once Stile Antico achieved a rare sense of balanced, detailed expansiveness.

Elsewhere, alas, things often slowed into a blurry trudge (the Anticans make all their artistic decisions collectively, so they rarely hit on a striking individual statement), broken by sudden, siren-like wake-up calls from the sopranos.  Sometimes even the transitions and transformations that the singers called attention to in their comments, like the shift from minor to major in Robert White's Magnificat, were a little hard to parse (subtlety is oft doomed in a collective).  And few of the pieces by Tallis's contemporary William Byrd made much of an impression, I thought - although Taverner's Audivi vocem de caelo was compellingly sung (by the women only, from the back of the church), and things suddenly picked up at the finish, with a truly ecstatic reading of John Sheppard's Verbum caro factum est (drawn from the opening of the Gospel of St. John).  And the encore, a motet by Tomás Luis de Victoria, was nearly as good.  It struck me that Stile Antico's true strength isn't actually polyphony at all; they seem to make their best impression with the single, simple power-chord.

To die for

Everybody loves Stile Antico (at left) the new early music vocal ensemble from Britain; rave has followed rave for their album releases (I think the Globe described their last one as "perfect"), and everyone seems to adore them even more since they were tapped by Sting for The Journey and the Labyrinth, his exploration of the music of John Dowland. If early music ever makes the pop charts, the thinking goes, Stile Antico might just be the group to do it.

The ensemble made its American debut last year at the Boston Early Music Festival, to great applause, and returned for a nearly sold-out performance this past weekend at St. Paul's Church in Harvard Square, one of those reactionary Catholic fantasias in which almost every kind of sacred architecture is piled togetherr, willy-nilly; St. Paul's design is roughly Italo-Gothic-Romanesque, with medieval friezes rubbing shoulders with baroque and even Tudor flourishes. It may not make aesthetic sense, but damn it puts the fear of God into you.

Still, if St. Paul's is an architectural hoot, it's also big and resonant, and an effective, if slightly crude, setting for the sepulchral sacred music that Stile Antico favors.  For their program on Saturday, the group had chosen music that was literally to die for - and a lot of it, too.  We got songs from the funeral of Philip II of Spain, as well as the entombment of Saxon nobleman Heinrich Reuss Posthumus (fitting name, no?), and the commemorative mass for René d'Anjou, King of Sicily (the Pope shaved off a thousand years in Purgatory for those who recited this text, which may give you some idea of how much fun it is).  We even got a song from Dufay that was composed to be sung around the composer's own deathbed, at the moment he expired.  I don't think I've ever heard quite so much Catholic lachrymosity in a single sitting; needless to say, when my partner and I got home, we watched Singin' in the Rain three times in a row.

Still, all the necrophilic dolor was heartfelt and lovely - it was just too relentless. And while Stile Antico sang beautifully, would you think me a bad person if I whispered that they're not quite as good as Sting thinks they are? The women, particularly the sopranos, are absolutely fabulous, it's true, with an effortless pure tone and a breathtaking sense of balance. Meanwhile the men are very good - but not quite as good as, say, Chanticleer or the Tallis Scholars; the tenors don't always have as much power as you'd like, and there's an odd buzz in the basses. The ensemble formed as a college group, and to be frank, sometimes it still sounds like one, albeit a very good one; plus it dispenses with a conductor - because you know, conductors are so yesterday (unlike early music) - but it's my impression that the men could use one. For interpretive questions always seem to be left open by the lack of a conductor; like A Far Cry, a local conductor-free string ensemble, Stile Antico seems to have an earnest stance but not much of a profile - because when a collective is making the artistic decisions, said decisions tend to regress to the mean; thus, just about every composer in this program sounded much like every other composer.

Of course sometimes the mean is pretty darn good - and to be honest, even Stile Antico's death-wish sometimes sounded like a tonic; for how often is death, and the question of the soul's rest, pondered by contemporary music? Almost never. True, to the academic, agnostic, gay-Jewish milieu of the early music scene, this concert's spiritual content was pretty alien (it might as well have come from a Tibetan monastery) - but it was still refreshing, if a little depressing, to hear so much calm contemplation of mortality. And Stile Antico brought true intensity to several pieces, particularly John Sheppard's epic Media vita, which dominated the first half of the program. Likewise there were heartbreakingly beautiful moments in the Dufay, as well as in William Byrd's "Retire my soul." A piece from the German requiem of Heinrich Schütz (one of the few Protestants - sort of - in the program) brought a livelier attack to the proceedings without any diminution in emotion. Still, when Schütz is as lively as your program gets, frankly it may be time for a variety check.