MUSIC REVIEWS : Living Sound From Theatre of Voices

It’s getting even harder to keep track of Paul Hillier’s multifarious activities. Sunday afternoon the peripatetic singer-conductor-professor-producer returned to Chamber Music in Historic Sites with his newest ensemble, the Theatre of Voices Chamber Choir.

The constant in Hillier’s far-flung and wide-ranging work is clean, passionate singing and intelligent, affecting programming. That was certainly the case Sunday, when he interwove Marian motets by Jean Mouton with the “Missa de Beata Virgine” by Josquin Despres, in the Mary Chapel on the Brentwood campus of Mount St. Mary’s College.

Introduced last summer at the Early Music Festival at UC Berkeley, the 15-member choir-- distinct from the Theatre of Voices solo ensemble--is a flexible, fluent group capable of both power and purity, and comfortable in unequal temperaments.

For Josquin, Hillier favored textures in which the linear processes were completely audible, and a driving sense of climax, particularly in the Gloria and Credo. There was nothing mechanical about the poised effort, however. Glowing, living sound filled the crystalline structures.

Rhythmically supple in Hillier’s strongly pulsed accounts, the choir sang with great textual point as well. Sometimes, as in the “Pleni sunt caeli” imitation, the quest for polyphonic identity and comprehensible text leads to moments of nasal exaggeration from inner parts, but the balances generally allowed clarity without distortion.

Hillier sought a weightier sound and darker colors for Mouton, represented by five motets of varied voicing and character. His choir gave him warm, focused and articulate singing.

In encore came Arvo Part’s Magnificat, a stunningly dramatic contemporary take on Renaissance vocal polyphony. Hillier shaped it with expressive restraint, and his singers displayed their control over an impressive dynamic range.