Angelica Delivers Sophisticated Seasonal Fare

No familiar carols or hoary seasonal cliches arose during Musica Angelica’s handsome but never spartan collection of holiday-related music titled “1,000 Years of Christmas,” over the weekend. Grateful listeners heard a joyous anthology of Christmas music, yet one that avoided both the banal and the esoteric.

Performed Friday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena--and scheduled for repeat in Santa Monica, Saturday--this program spotlighted seven members of the Renaissance / Baroque ensemble, which specializes in historically informed performances; these events opened the ensemble’s sixth season.

All Saints remains a most welcoming acoustical venue for small-group concerts--this one resounded clearly and brilliantly except when the singers and players talked; many of their spoken comments went unprojected. No matter. The music-making made all the important points.

Violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, tenor Daniel Plaster, sopranos Samela Aird Beasom, Susan Judy and Christen Herman, archlutenist Michael Eagen and bass viol-player Mark Chatfield shared the considerable duties in a wide-ranging program, which offered music from the Middle Ages (from manuscripts) and from composers like Byrd, Biber, Ravenscroft and Bach through our contemporaries, Chatfield and Eagen.

Whether difficult of execution--as are Biber’s “Rosary” Sonatas, virtuosically rendered by Blumenstock--or simply demanding in matters of style, all this music was treated with affectionate care.

Among other high points of the evening were Plaster’s clear-voiced singing, beautifully assisted by violinist Blumenstock, of Bach’s “Frohe hirten eilt,” Chatfield’s new and attractive seasonal melange for the group, “Christmas Encounter,” and the closing group of three settings of “In Dulci Jubilo”--one from 1601, a highly colored realization from this century (probably this decade) by the imaginative Eagen, and Bach’s. Even the most Christmas-phobic of listeners would have to find in these joyous pieces the very best aspects of this season.