by Michael Caruso

Just as it fell to the Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Chestnut Hill, to open the Christmas season with music on Sunday, Dec. 4, the second Sunday of Advent, so it fell to St. Martin’s to bring the season to a close musically on Sunday, Jan. 8, the Feast of the Epiphany. In both instances, the parish presented Lessons and Carols, the traditional Anglican service of readings from Scripture plus carols and choral works to enhance their spiritual and emotional impact. The former service prepared the way for Christmas while the latter marked the visit of the magi to see the infant Jesus.

Parish music director Erik Meyer opened and closed the Festival of Lessons and Carols playing St. Martin’s beautiful pipe organ. The Prelude was Louis-Claude Daquin’s “Noel X;” the Postlude was John Cook’s “Paean on ‘Divinum Mysterium’.” Meyer caught the tart timbres and dance rhythms of the French Baroque/Rococo Daquin’s piece with a clarity of color that showed off the instrument’s bright registrations. He was especially efficacious shifting from one manual (keyboard) to the next in a captivating series of statements and echoes. In the Cook, a onetime organist at the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Boston, Meyer paced his selection of registrations to offer an ongoing crescendo that projected a sonic line of progression from very soft to very loud with unaffected yet controlled inevitability.

The evening’s finest choral work was Tomas Luis de Victoria’s “O magnum mysterium” (O great mystery). The Spanish master’s score unfolds like a summation of sacred choral music reaching all the way back to the 7th century and the first notations of plainsong under Pope Gregory the Great in Rome. At its foundation is the chant for which it is named. Upon it Victoria constructed a modal edifice of polyphony and counterpoint that sonically delineates the mystery of Christ’s birth surrounded by animals in a stable, lying in their manger.

St. Martin’s Choir sang this masterpiece with technical mastery and interpretive intensity. Meyer established and maintained a perfect balance between the various vocal parts. Even the tenors – so often the weakest part of any church choir – sang with a level of supple expressiveness and substantive amplitude to equal that of the sopranos, altos and basses. The result was a vibrant yet intimate dialogue between the seamless flow of phrases that moved unswervingly to its final resolution.

Of very nearly equal compositional quality is Harold Darke’s “In the bleak midwinter.” The late 19th and mid-20th century Englishman composed many splendid works of sacred choral music for the Church of England. Darke’s musical style was inspired by the Anglo-Catholic movement to retrieve from near oblivion the great traditions of liturgy and music that had been abandoned and nearly lost. Of them all, this particular carol has always maintained pride-of-place. Meyer led a performance, begun by the youngest choristers, that glowed with tonal warmth, spoke with enveloping intimacy and trembled with heartfelt simplicity.

One can almost always know for certain at the very start if a particular Lessons and Carols is going to be a success. The choral portion of the service traditionally begins with the singing of the carol, “Once in royal David’s city.” In the tradition started by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, the carol’s first verse is always sung by a solo boy treble. At St. Martin’s, that tradition was followed superbly. Treble Josh Crusi delivered those opening words and notes with a steadiness of projection and an eloquence of phrasing any and every professional singer should envy. I knew from that opening verse that this would be an Epiphany Lessons and Carols to remember for many a season to come.