Music of the Baroque serves up a festive, eclectic Brass and Choral program

After a memorable start to what is shaping up to being a banner season, Music of the Baroque is coming home for the holidays.

Hot on the heels of a run of first-rate performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio over Thanksgiving week, MOB has re-upped one of its beloved annual traditions, the Holiday Brass and Choral Concerts. Chorus director Andrew Megill is back at his conducting post after an illness waylaid him from leading last year’s concerts.

The venue for Friday evening’s installment was St. Michael Church in Old Town, one of MOB’s longtime holiday homesteads and the site of the yuletide series’ debut 45 years ago. This year’s program served up familiar fare in the vein of 16th-century polyphony, with the likes of Giovanni Gabrieli and Michael Praetorius making a strong showing.

But the distinguishing mark of this program was a contingent of early Baroque-era songs from the New World, among them works by Spanish-born composers Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Francisco Guerrero and Juan de Araujo.

The MOB brass teed off the evening with Gabrieli’s Canzoni septimi toni a 8 by way of fanfare, after which Megill began to pound a steady beat on a tom as the chorus filed onstage from the rear of hall to the solemn verses of “Hanacpachap cussicuinin,” a work of unknown provenance that sets text in the Incan Quechua language to European counterpoint.

The MOB chorus was reliably excellent throughout the program’s first half, singing with clarity of diction and suppleness of sound in sacred and profane selections alike. Megill’s fine handiwork similarly emerged from the jump in Padilla’s “Joseph fili David,” whose gyroscopic strains of melody the conductor articulated with a watchmaker’s precision.

A selection of villancicos, including Gerónimo Gonzales’ “Serenísima una noche” and “Convidando está la noche” by Juan García de Zéspedes, found the singers in a more populist Christmas vein that married pliant dance rhythms with jubilant references to the Nativity.

To close out the program’s first half, Gabrieli’s “In ecclesiis a 14” transported the audience back to St. Mark’s Basilica of 17th-century Venice, the cradle from which Gabrieli’s musical inventions were born. One such innovation is the composer’s propensity for orchestration, which was given full advocacy in the pithy sounds of MOB’s combined vocal and instrumental forces.

With the chorus arrayed throughout the aisles and a battery of brass stationed at the front of the hall, soloists Victoria Marshall and Michael St. Peter ascended to the pulpit 15 feet above the chapel floor, where their fine-grained alto and tenor voices intertwined as they soared above the brass section’s magisterial declamations.

Whether accompanying voices or on their own, the MOB brass section, captained by longtime principal trumpet Barbara Butler, were in peak form all night. The brass flexed their chops after intermission with a pair of splendid section features, Vierdanck’s Capriccioso a 3 Cornetti and Daniel Speer’s Sonata for 4 Trombones, performed from opposite ends of the cathedral in a sort of regal call and response.

Gabrieli’s canzonas and sonatas are stock in trade for brass musicians, and these players’ practiced mastery in this mode was evident in a characteristic buoyancy of sound and clean articulation, especially in a virtually faultless reading of the composer’s Sonata XIII.

Rounding out the second set was the pairing of three Guerrero villancicos with the florid motet “Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden” by J.S. Bach, which the chorus dispatched with zeal. The continuo section, comprising cellist Anna Steinhoff and the ever-reliable Stephen Alltop at the organ, reinforced the chorus’ sound with rhythmic springiness and ample harmonic cushion.

In homage to the Venetian tradition — and in keeping with these concerts’ aim to draw attention to the beautiful spaces where they take place — the musicians moved and repositioned throughout the chapel for various selections, taking advantage of St. Michael’s reverberant acoustic.

This was deployed most effectively in Michael Praetorius’ “In dulci jubilo,” wherein brass players intermingled with choristers along the aisles of the venue to enfold the audience in gleaming blankets of sound. The most memorable moment of the evening came as the chorus’ alternating strains in German and Latin culminated in a pristine cadence, which the brass festooned with layers of rippling polyphony.

In a contemplative denouement to the evening, MOB deployed another longstanding tradition with the plainchant “Te Deum laudamus,” featuring handbell accompaniment by choristers Susan Nelson, Ryan Townsend Strand, and MOB’s longest-serving member, Jan Jarvis. (In his opening remarks, MOB executive director Declan McGovern announced that Jarvis will be retiring from the ensemble at the end of the 2024-25 season after more than 50 years in MOB’s employ.)

As the familiar closer, the chorus offered a benedictory rendition of Praetorius’ glowing setting, “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen.”