Music Reviews : Sistine Chapel Choir Sings at Chandler Pavilion

After enjoying something of a boom in the heyday of Roger Wagner, Robert Shaw and others, Renaissance choral polyphony is now most commonly encountered on campuses. Early music specialists have gravitated to smaller ensembles and ever more esoteric repertory, and the large semi-professional choruses tend to offer showier, orchestrally accompanied music.

The music of Palestrina and his heirs--both ancient and modern--is the daily bread of the Sistine Chapel Choir, however. Tuesday the 44 men and boys of the Capella Sixtina sang a taut program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, beginning a series of local engagements.

Directed by Domenico Bartolucci since 1956, the choir is a flexible, well-drilled instrument. Its sound was dominated in the concert hall’s acoustic by clear, powerful sopranos and occasionally revealed hard edges, surely conditioned for a more reverberant environment.

The first half of the effectively designed and ordered concert was devoted to Palestrina, in unhackneyed examples. Bartolucci began with “Bonum Est,” and continued with five motets on texts from “The Song of Songs,” revealing a characteristic penchant for moderate tempos, caressive word painting and linear punch.

The post-intermission portion took a more narrowly liturgical direction, beginning with Lassus (a stately sung “Jubilate Deo”) and Victoria (a deeply probing, emotionally exhausting “Caligaverunt”), and ending with more Palestrina (a highly stylized account of the Credo from the “Missa Papae Marcelli,” building to a truly monumental Amen).

In between came three works by Bartolucci himself, clearly formed on traditional styles and language but with agreeably quirky idiosyncrasies as well. His six-part “Accessistis ad Jerusalem” suggested the influence of Eastern Orthodox music, his “Quo Abiit”--another “Song of Songs” text--employed a deceptively simple soprano solo in an almost folk-like setting, while the most conventional was his Marian “Inviolata.”

Within this far-from-confining repertory, Bartolucci and his charges proved alert to textual and textural nuance. The Sistine intonation sounded piquantly untempered--sometimes simply out-of-tune--and lines stretched but never broke under Bartolucci’s almost note-by-note ministrations.

Two encores completed the concert. The choir is also scheduled to sing Friday at El Camino College in Torrance, Saturday at Citrus College in Glendora, and Sunday afternoon at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.