MUSIC REVIEW : Hickock’s Irvine Camerata Gives Inaugural Performance at UC Irvine

To an enthusiastic capacity audience in Fine Arts Concert Hall at UC Irvine on Friday night, the Irvine Camerata’s inaugural concert brought both intelligent planning and brilliance of execution.

Founded by Robert Hickock, dean of fine arts at UCI, the 25-voice ensemble reportedly began rehearsing less than two weeks ago. Yet this professional group admirably met the technical and artistic challenges of the meaty program.

Opening with the plainchant “Salve Regina,” the Camerata built the first part of the program around several 16th-Century settings of the “Salve Regina” text, which were interspersed between the five movements of Palestrina’s “Missa Salve Regina.”

In motets by William Byrd, Tomas Luis de Victoria and others, Hickock demonstrated the degree of precision and polish he attained: superb intonation, great textual clarity and a stunning tone--particularly in the spellbinding soft passages--characterized the ensemble’s singing.

Though his conducting was perhaps excessively physical, he elicited telling nuances of phrasing and imparted a fine sense of overall shape to each work.

Sometimes, though, balances were askew: The sopranos outgunned the altos, who were divided into two parts in the Palestrina and in the five-part motets.

Bernard Heiden’s “Divine Poems of John Donne” (1949) completed the a cappella part of the program. The Camerata made an extremely convincing case for the three evocative, potent and highly personal settings of the poems, effectively bringing out the striking dynamic contrasts of the works.

During intermission, a large pipe organ had been moved onto the stage for the ensemble’s performance of Heinrich Schutz’s “Musikalische Exequien” (Musical Requiem). The 1636 work is a fine example of early Baroque sacred music; a fairly lengthy text is covered, without a great deal of repetition, and the texture is more chordal than contrapuntal.

The short solo and soli sections, all of which were sung with precision, resonance and style, alternated with equally short sections of choral singing, delivered with vibrancy and exuberance.

Both chorus and individual soloists sang the German text clearly and cogently, and organist Ronald Huntington and the other continuo players (two cellos, one bass) contributed handsomely.