While the vast treasure of Renaissance choral music has inspired composers of later centuries to imitate its rich, complex style, each era recreates this music in its own image. Ruben Venezuela and his chorus from the Bach Collegium San Diego offered a generous sampling of Renaissance motets and their later offspring that savored these relationships across the centuries in a beautifully structured program Friday (Dec. 16) at St. James Episcopal Church, La Jolla.

Not many choirs can move seamlessly from historically informed accounts of Tudor church music—the likes of Tallis, Sheppard and Parsons—to the piquant contemporary choral minimalism of John Tavener and Eric Whitacre, but Valenzuela has the deft touch and insight to make this happen. Given the season of the year, it was not surprising that his program followed a liturgical progression from the season of Advent, those weeks of expectation prior to Christmas, to the celebration of the Nativity.

From the medieval Advent chant, “Rorate Coeli,” intoned with austere dignity yet vocal warmth by the male voices, to the polished polyphony of Thomas Weelkes’ “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” the familiar biblical stories unfolded. Fortunately, Valenzuela found exceptional and refreshing versions of these hallowed texts, such as Robert Parsons’ “Magnificat,” an obscure, mid 16^th-century English masterpiece of angular, aggressive counterpoint that revels in the incendiary implications of that ancient text. “He has put down the mighty from their seats and has exalted the humble and meek,” sounds like the placard slogans of the occupy movement, and the Bach Collegium singers articulated these vocal lines with panache and bright colors.

Of the contemporary selections, I was quite taken by John Tavener’s “Annunciation,” where the robust full choir declaims the angelic message over an ominous organ pedal point, and a mixed vocal quartet—located antiphonally at the rear of the church nave—sings Mary’s response, a single line repeated in anguished, close harmonies, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” The rapture of Tavener’s serene harmonic progressions called to mind another minimalist choral gem, Arvo Pärt’s “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old,” performed last month in concert by San Diego’s Sacra/Profana. In each case, the performers captured the “fire and ice” emotional quality of this stream of choral music, a welcome antidote to the arid complexity of so much new instrumental music.

Tavener’s setting of the William Blake’s “The Lamb,” however, sounded little more than dutiful, although the poem’s cloying imagery may not be redeemable by even heightened musical inspiration. More successful was Herbert Howells’ “Here Is the Little Door,” which begins bathed in Victorian sentimentality only to do a stirring about face as Frances Chesterton’s poetry invokes militant imagery. This Christmas anthem showed the shimmering sonic balance and declamatory unity of the 19-voice Bach Collegium Chorus. As conductor, Valenzuela is a minimalist by choral conducting standards, keeping his motions precise and restrained.

From the early music ledger, William Byrd’s motet “Vigilate” impressed with lustrous, dark colors by the male voices and the clarity of their traversal of its vigorous polyphony, but John Sheppard’s winsomely crafted “Sanctus and Benedictus” from his Missa Cantate lost focus in the midsection. Like the Weelkes motet, it sounded under rehearsed.

Valenzuela sensitively sculpted the dynamic lines of Eric Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque,” one of the most frequently performed contemporary minimalist choral works. I wish the conductor had lingered more over its dense harmonic palette to savor the depth of this eloquent tone poem. Hearing Thomas Tallis’ Tudor motet “O Nata Lux,” I could not help but superimpose in my own mind Morten Lauridsen’s contemporary setting of this same text, expanding Tallis’ chaste harmonies into Laurisen’s radiant clusters. Perhaps placing the Tallis between Tavener and Whitacre induced this mental makeover.

Now in its ninth season, Valenzuela’s Bach Collegium San Diego continues to set high performance standards and to prove there is an eager audience for something new, even when the new is actually quite old.

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