MUSIC REVIEW : Sistine Chapel Choir at Chandler Pavilion

After enjoying something of a boom in the heyday of Roger Wagner, Robert Shaw and others, Renaissance choral polyphony now is most commonly encountered on campuses. Early music specialists have gravitated to smaller ensembles and ever more esoteric repertory, and the large semiprofessional 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. Earlier this week, the 44 men and boys of the Capella Sixtina sang a taut program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, beginning a series of local engagements that will bring them to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoon.

Directed by Domenico Bartolucci since 1956, the choir is a flexible, well-drilled instrument. The first half of its 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 Sistine Chapel Choir sings Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $8 to $25. Information: (714) 642-8232.