For almost 30 years, the a cappella vocal quartet Anonymous 4 has been stretching the musical envelope across the centuries. Traveling the world with a repertoire that runs from medieval plainsong to American Civil War tunes, Renaissance motets to a spanking new David Lang setting of a Lydia Davis short story, the group turned crystalline tone, burnished harmonies, seamless phrasing, and pristine diction in multiple languages into an unmistakable sound and musical brand. They were from the start and remained a singular phenomenon, with some 20 albums and a devoted following.
Now it’s all coming to an end. As part of a farewell tour, Anonymous 4 sang a characteristically diverse program at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on Oct. 18. The hour-long concert was at once beautiful, hypnotic, and a little remote, with a certain interpretive sameness and not so much as a word of spoken commentary from the departing singers.
That’s in keeping with the group’s “Anonymous” moniker and orientation. The music, much of it sacred and some of it hauntingly strange to modern ears unaccustomed to medieval melodies and harmonies, trumps the musicians. There’s a devotional quality to the group and its style, a self-effacement and air of ethereal detachment the audience receives as a kind of sacrament. There’s a devotional quality to the group and its style, a self-effacement and air of ethereal detachment the audience receives as a kind of sacrament.
While something a little warmer and more varied might have suited another group’s farewell, Anonymous 4 is staying in character to the end. In saying goodbye – as they did once before, in a 2004 false alarm – the ensemble once again placed the purity of their music above the performers’ personalities. Local audiences will have one more chance to hear them live, when the farewell tour swings back through St. Mark’s on Nov. 15.
Sunday’s well-attended concert opened with an early 15th-century unison chant, from the group’s hit 1992 album An English Ladymass. Voices were added and subtracted through the evening, in two- three- and four-part configurations. There were several solos.
Right away, the gently reverberant acoustics of St. Mark’s proved to be a felicitous match. Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genesky, Susan Hellauer, and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek lofted their voices into the space where they spread and diffused through the sanctuary, without undue echoing effects.
The Christmas carol “Ecce quod natura,” provided an early flurry of harmonic interest, with the transverse motion of an interpolated fauxbourdon harmony below the two melodic lines. The strict open parallels of an apocalyptic meditation from the 10th Century came across with appropriately stark decoration, like carved stone. The odd, 13th-century conductus that followed meandered through a melismatic minefield, with the Latin word for “now” (“nunc”) getting particularly close attention.
A brief, intense selection from Hildegarde von Bingen, which managed to convey both fluid movement and mesmerizing stillness, was as vivid as its language, about divinely red blood and “the icy winter of the serpent’s breath.” Like many of the lyrics, the translation, from Latin here, is by one of the members (Hellauer in this instance).
Sensitively and precisely rendered as much of the music was, the round tones and pillowy phrasing had a lulling, leveling effect. Moments of high spiritual or carnal passion tended to come across without much more force or emphasis than more subdued lines. Genesky proved to be a welcome exception, in her slightly raw, borderline rowdy account of “You fair and pretty ladies,” a folk monologue of a wounded lover.
As for the singers speaking only in song, it would have helped if someone had explained the apparent departure from the printed program at one point in the evening. But vows, it seems are not to be broken – apart from the one Anonymous 4 took when it said they were retiring a decade ago.
This time, apparently, they mean it. Just don’t ask them to explain it.