Oxford choristers make robust L.A. history

The name Dana T. Marsh should have a familiar ring to Southland early music mavens; he spent several years here (1992-2000) directing the Paulist Choristers of California before moving on to Oxford to pursue graduate studies. Last year, Marsh founded a new vocal ensemble there, Musica Humana Oxford; fittingly, the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series lured Marsh and company to Los Angeles for their first American appearance Sunday afternoon.

Musica Humana Oxford has already achieved a tightly knit, flowing, robust blend of seven male and two female voices that avoids preciousness and a cloistered scholarly attitude. And they were placed in a space that made the voices bloom, the vast First Congregational Church on Commonwealth Avenue at 6th Street.

William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices served as an overall unifying structure in the first half, in which the rather plain, predictable sections of the Mass were juxtaposed with richer, more polyphonically involved responses by Byrd, Tallis and Christopher Tye. The more emotionally charged music of Purcell occupied most of the second half, with a patina of anguish coloring his “Funeral Sentences” and “Lord, I Can Suffer Thy Rebukes.” Eventually, Purcell’s joyous “O Sing Unto the Lord” brought us out of the darkness and even several decades ahead of its time, for the line “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is king,” points the way startlingly toward Handel’s “Messiah.”

As a prelude, ensemble organist Matthew Martin played the church’s massive Skinner-Schlicker instrument, giving it a flamboyant workout with Byrd’s Fantasia in D Minor.