Fab 4 bids adieu to early music works

The temperature in Pasadena was over 100 on Sunday at 4, when the concert began. Westminster Presbyterian Church was not air-conditioned. The music was extremely old, reaching back as early as the 9th century. There wasn’t much variety by modern standards, at least not in the way of harmony or melody. The four singers, whose similar voices often blended into the sound of a single voice when they sang in unison, stood soberly as they performed, expecting arcane sacred music to speak for itself. The texts were by a mystic who, musicologists now suspect, suffered from migraines and was delusional.

It was the recipe for a perfectly awful afternoon. Yet the church was packed. A devout audience came to hear and say farewell to one of the more curious and agreeable phenomena in the musical world of the last two decades: Anonymous 4. After 17 years, these four women, whose specialty is medieval music and whose latest CD recently hit No. 1 on the Billboard classical chart, will disband after one last concert in New York on May 16.

That four women with pure high voices, a scholarly bent for obscure early music and barely a theatrical bone among them could attract such a wide following indicates either that there are a lot more early music zealots than the movement ever suspected or that Anonymous 4 found a universal character in music that, before these ladies came along, was relegated to a specialized corner of academia. Or maybe supremely beautiful singing simply transcends all other considerations.

Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner and Johanna Maria Rose became early music’s fab four, generating interest in whatever musty manuscripts they unearthed from church vaults and providing inspiration for other hit female early music vocal groups, ranging from the cutesy and not bad crossover Medieval Babes to Scandinavia’s blandly pretty Trio Medieval.

Sunday’s concert, part of the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series administered by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College, was a typically solemn affair. The program, “The Origin of Fire,” was devoted to Hildegard of Bingen and arranged into four “visions” of one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. Sometimes called the “sibyl of the Rhine,” this untrained musician of the 12th century claimed to take music as dictation from God and then organized women in her convent to sing it. She not only produced probably the most vivid music of her age but managed through her revelations to make contributions in medicine and the physical sciences as well. Her highly poetic and mystical concept of the cosmos has many New Age devotees to this day.

The Anonymous 4 program concentrated on the “fire of the holy spirit,” a fire that Hildegard believed inflames the passions of life and love. Each vision began with a solo chant and included Hildegard’s music and some of her resplendent poetry adapted to later polyphonic music from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Anonymous 4 brought a radiance to all it sang, as it always has, but it seemed on the tame side on this occasion, the straightforward presentation not always capturing Hildegard’s ecstatic nature. The women may have needed to keep their exertion down, given how warm they must have been onstage. But a suspicion that Anonymous 4’s heart was no longer in it was hard to shake.

The women have branched out in recent years, performing new music by John Tavener. On their new CD, “American Angels,” they present a lively account of New England psalmody and Southern shape-note singing. The group sang a number from this terrific disc, the single encore Sunday, and it was electrifying. It is that encore I suspect will stay with me.

Anonymous 4 has been, to the end, a class act that achieved popularity without compromise and transformed the early music movement. It now exits as tastefully as it arrived. But it’s not quite finished. Sunday’s Hildegard program will be the material of the group’s final CD, to be released later this year.