Pleasures of Discovery With Musica Angelica

The early music world requires a delicate balance of historicism and sensuousness, the art of bringing antiquities to empathetic, very present-day life. The fine and inspiring Los Angeles-based early music group Musica Angelica, which began its seventh concert season Friday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, has that agenda well in hand.

But the group also unleashed another important element, that of discovery, with the West Coast premiere of English composer John Blow’s early opera “Venus and Adonis,” written in 1691. “Premiere” is a word common to new music performance, but here it indicates the deposits of musical treasure waiting to be mined.

This seminal opera, movingly presented here, is a stately, compact music theater experience about love of mythic proportions, enriched by elements of comedy (as with Cupid’s archery scene) and tragedy (Adonis’ demise). Strong vocal talent was heard throughout the evening, particularly in the bold and supple voice of soprano Jennifer Ellis as Venus. Baritone David Newman’s Adonis was glowingly articulated, and soprano Susan Judy was suitably coy as mediator Cupid.

It was also an ensemble affair, with frequent and lustrous interjections of a nine-voice chorus, the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra (led by founder and archlutenist Michael Eagan) and the comic and cuteness relief of the young girls known as “Little Cupids.”