Anonymous 4’s Tone Tales of St. Nicholas

Intellectually enlightening, aurally delightful and genuinely provocative, Anonymous 4’s latest local performance--the medieval vocal quartet has been visiting here for nearly a decade now--paid tribute to a colorful, beneficent and sometimes mean-spirited Christmas icon.

“Legends of St. Nicholas,” a concert reiterating the music on Anonymous 4’s ninth CD, came to El Camino Center for the Arts Friday night and spread subtle joys as well as esoteric information. A large audience paid rapt attention to the quiet but strikingly detailed pleasures shared by singers Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner and Johanna Maria Rose, a most successful performing group now 14 years old.

As an a cappella chant/polyphony quartet, the ensemble delivered a tight but extensive, intermissionless, 63-minute program honoring the legends surrounding the ancient patron saint of sailors and a modern model of Christian charity. One does not expect this level of variety in an agenda of music hundreds of years old, yet variety informed the entire project, which held the listener engrossingly through motets, hymns, songs and composed readings (the latter created by the members of Anonymous 4).

Controversy and self-contradiction mark these legends, as indeed they would concerning any sainted person of any time.

The four pure-voiced, effortlessly enunciating singers proved consistently expressive, musically apprehensible through all these tone tales. Their pleasure in performing this program was palpable, as was the appreciation of an attentive, thoroughly mixed audience.