Anonymous 4 at Longwood
The early-music vocal quartet Anonymous 4 invariably gives beautiful-sounding performances. But has a concert ever smelled as wonderful as Thursday's medieval music program in Longwood Garden's ballroom in Kennett Square? Enchanting scents from the heavily flowered courtyard drifted in like a floral tapestry from the group's album covers come to life.
The early-music vocal quartet Anonymous 4 invariably gives beautiful-sounding performances. But has a concert ever smelled as wonderful as Thursday's medieval music program in Longwood Garden's ballroom in Kennett Square? Enchanting scents from the heavily flowered courtyard drifted in like a floral tapestry from the group's album covers come to life.
Longwood has been producing first-class pop and classical concerts. This one offered Anonymous 4 in something other than the typical Christmas programs for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.
This concert was divided between the just-released Marie et Marion album of French medieval music and the group's alternative persona - 19th-century Americana songs and hymns, sung in ways they were originally heard. The combination was odd, but not too odd, since the singers employ the same focused, vibrato-light vocal production.
It was an attentive full-house audience, much of which was glued to the program translations of 13th-century French motets that superimpose four different texts over one another, leaving any literal-minded listener not knowing what to zero in on at any given moment. One listens in the spirit of studying the plethora of imagery in church architecture.
Drawn from the Montpellier Codex by composers unknown, the music particularly benefits from Anonymous 4's lyrical musicality, which makes pieces with even the most crowded inner voices seem like all of a piece. The four singers inhabit a separate but congruent sphere of expressivity. Often, Susan Hellauer sang the long, inner-voice lines - the others intertwined around it - with implied eloquence. Listeners might not have heard specific meaning, but felt a heightened sense of purpose that she brought to the music.
The Americana second half had familiar tunes such as "Amazing Grace" embedded in harmonies that quickly felt overfamiliar, but allowed a message to be projected into large, unamplified spaces. The gracious Longwood ballroom isn't large, but has nothing of the church acoustic that can seem as much a part of the group's sound as the voices. One missed the glow of that extra resonance, but it's hardly required.