The art of the conquest

Monteverdi’s “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin” was written to fill a great cathedral with sound. That was a common enough practice in the early 17th century. But for all its grandeur and lavish praising of God, the real aim of this collection of various liturgical vocal and instrumental pieces is seduction -- bald, shameless, chains-of-love seduction by one of the greatest charmers in all music.

The promise, then, of hearing the Vespers performed by Boston Baroque in Walt Disney Concert Hall was great. The period-instrument ensemble and chorus, founded in 1973, is the oldest purveyor of old music in the country and was once nominated for a Grammy for its state-of-the-art recording of the Monteverdi score. Boston Baroque’s founder and music director, Martin Pearlman, is a longtime champion of the composer. Put this exalted, sensual music in a seductive space, play and sing it well, and a conquest might seem inevitable.

But the Bostonians, who made their West Coast debut with this appearance Tuesday night, do not practice the art of seduction with anything like the skill of their period-practice technique. The well-prepared performance -- part of a tour that will also reach the Ravinia Festival and Tanglewood this summer -- couldn’t be faulted on fluidity, on seamless choral singing of contrapuntally complex music, on stylistic expertise. But to learn about the aspects of Monteverdi’s achievement that these skills revealed, you can turn to the nearly unreadably dry, yet authoritative, analytic guidebook to the Vespers in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series.

Unlike that handbook, the Boston Baroque performance wasn’t overly academic or even unmusical. What it was was a concert performance and no more -- of music that is very much more.

The Vespers, often called the “1610 Vespers” after its publication date, is associated with St. Mark’s in Venice, because three years after its publication, Monteverdi left his post in Mantua, in northern Italy, for a residency in the Venice basilica. What a treat it must be to hear the Vespers in such a marvelously ornate space. Monteverdi took advantage of vaulting acoustics by dividing his choir in various ways, by creating echo effects in which one soloist calls back from afar to another and by producing rich sonorities intended to elaborately bounce off walls.

Between the big psalm settings, the composer inserted motets for solo singers that suddenly veer from basilica to bedroom. In “Nigra sum,” a tenor tells of a dark-skinned beauty in Jerusalem loved by the king in his chamber, and surging music suggestively enhances the words. In “Duo Seraphim,” two tenors spaced at either end of the hall represent alluring angels on high. They then become part of a trio with a third onstage singing elaborately entwined vocal lines.

The best of the soloists was tenor Mark Tucker, who in “Nigra sum” came closest to capturing the erotic operatic energy of the motets. Elsewhere in the motets, the psalms, the Magnificat and the brief solo chants, sopranos Sharon Baker and Kristen Watson and tenors Lynton Atkinson and Frank Kelley were musically acceptable but lacking in charisma. Basses Nicholas Isherwood and Mark Andrew Cleveland buzzed unpleasantly.

The psalm settings represent Monteverdi at his most colorful and effusive. But here, period instruments and a small chorus -- for all their technical accomplishment -- failed to fill Disney. Pearlman’s conducting was dutiful but not -- like the music -- daring, let alone seditious.

Last fall, the extraordinary Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng audaciously staged the “1610 Vespers” in Boston in an acclaimed production that soon will hit the European festival circuit. Now, how do we get the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which presented Boston Baroque as part of its Baroque Variations series and the culmination of its Building Music project, to take another Vesper shopping trip to Beantown?