Tapestry Weaves Through the Centuries With Precision

As an antidote to all the blithering hype about the millennium, Tapestry offered a thoughtful, varied response Sunday afternoon in Pasadena’s Westminster Presbyterian Church.

The Boston-based female vocal trio emerged slowly from the rear of the church, opening with a text suggesting a dark apocalypse, and moved on in the direction of light and hope, mixing music dating from the 12th century’s Hildegard von Bingen with that of contemporary composers writing in older styles. The cool, clear radiance of Cristi Catt’s soprano would give way to a highly syncopated Bulgarian folk song from alto Daniela Tosic, and a passionately expressive performance of Robert Kyr’s “The Fourth River” by mezzo-soprano Laurie Monahan (who also wrote the text). With percussionist Takaaki Masuko tapping a hand drum, the trio wrapped up the set with a joyous Kyr setting from Ecclesiastes, the same verses that inspired Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

Tapestry’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert went on to other solstice-season topics, but the first set alone established that this trio is more than just another gathering of early-music specialists. They sing beautifully separately and together with a glistening tone and precise intonation, and they like to shift gears, giving Hanukkah its due, touching upon Sephardic material, 16th century Spanish repertory and Gaelic songs before concluding with selections, accompanied by marimba, from Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols.”

Yet some who were looking forward to the spacious, highly reverberant sound of their recordings--the latest of which, “The Fourth River: The Millennium Revealed,” was just released by Telarc--may have been disappointed by the relatively dry acoustics. Also, “Ceremony,” without the prescribed boys’ choir and harp, lost the magical character of Britten’s distinctive harmonic idiom. The use of a drum in “This Little Babe,” however, was a good fit for the militant text, if not the music.