MUSIC REVIEW : BEEGLE, N.Y. ENSEMBLE AT HANCOCK AUDITORIUM

Thanks to the dauntlessness of modern musicology, there are increasingly fewer and fewer musical stones to upturn in the search for untapped repertory. If ever there were a group dedicated to such a laudable pursuit, the New York Vocal Arts Ensemble, heard at Hancock Auditorium, USC, on Tuesday night, is a notable nominee.

With its four sublimely flexible singers and the sense of mission its director, Raymond Beegle, brings to constructing fresh programs, the ensemble is in a perfect position to reacquaint audiences with the gems (and, it must be admitted, near-gems) of the often underheard vocal quartet repertory.

This task it acquitted well and amiably Tuesday. Sporting a card including Scott Joplin, Brahms, spirituals, Tchaikovsky, vaudevillian extraordinaire Joseph E. Howard, Rossini and Johann Strauss, Jr., the four singers--soprano Lise Messier, mezzo Mary Ann Hart, tenor Gregory Mercer and baritone Paul Rowe--managed to blend a sense of high camp and unfailingly seamless ensemble singing into a charming package.

The lively piano accompaniments by Beegle were an integral and bracing part of the proceedings, but even more satisfying was the way Beegle shared yarns, stray bits of biographical/musicological and apocrypha with the audience. Instead of shades of condescension or (worse by far) pedantry, the director-pianist came to be relied upon like a wise if slightly daft uncle, providing humorous illuminations without making a lecture-demonstration out of them.

Highlights of the 1 1/2-hour performance, benefiting the Koldofsky Fellowship, included Mercer’s soaring, echt -Italian traversal of Tosti’s “Aprile”; a smooth-as-cream performance, a cappella, of Brahms’ “Wie schoen bist Du”; and, after intermission, Hart’s rich, very touching assay of Britten’s arrangement of the Irish folk tune “In the Mid Hour of Night.”

Once the ensemble began tearing into Howard’s winning (if corny) “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” however, it was clear that--in spite of one’s best training--those ditties of yesteryear just never fail to conjure up a grin, especially when invested with such brio as did this group and its director.