Of late I've been getting a short course in the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria; the Tallis Scholars featured him prominently in their BEMF appearance last week, even as the Handel and Haydn Society paired him with Francis Poulenc in "Harry's Vocal Voyage," a program which, despite its rather buoyant title, proved a poignant face-off between the sacred music of two very different epochs. Or was it really a face-off? Sometimes it felt more like a hand-off; for under the sensitive direction of Harry Christophers, the sensibilities of Victoria and Poulenc did seem to mysteriously align across the centuries.

In some ways, this consonance shouldn't be so surpising, even though the composers are separated by roughly three hundred years. Both were obsessed with matters of faith, and wrote mostly (or only) sacred music; and both toyed with dissonance (or at least Victoria toyed with what counted as dissonance for his time). Their seeming twinship most clearly derives, however, from a shared sense of emotion pushing against structure; they consistently penned statements of faith that feel as if a rising well of mournfulness is about to spill over its enclosure of prayer and into a cascading wail of passion.

We don't know much about Victoria's private life (aside from the fact that he became a priest); we do know that tragedy sparked Poulenc's turn to the sacred. A wealthy gay bon vivant in his youth, the composer first became known as a member of the loose-knit musical alliance Les six. The death of a close friend in a car wreck, followed by a grief-stricken pilgrimage to the gaunt "Black Madonna" of Rocamadour (at left), changed all that; from then on, sacred music - or music devoted to spiritual subjects - would dominate the composer's output.

Poulenc never entirely lost his clever sensualism, it's true (in mid-career he was famously summed up as "half monk and half delinquent"), but Christophers chose for his program works that all but throbbed with grief (particularly the four "motets from a time of penitence," written soon after his friend's death).  And Christophers sculpted his selections from Victoria (particularly the gorgeous Litaniae Beatae Mariae) with a far greater sense of drama and variety than the Tallis Scholars had hazarded - indeed, he drew out a shockingly lush sensualism from pieces like Victoria's Nigra sum sed formosa (drawn from the famously erotic Song of Solomon). Of course Christophers tended to the particulars of polyphony, homophony, antiphonal singing and all the rest - he did no violence to Victoria stylistically, and the chorus sounded wonderful - but he didn't seem absorbed in the technical issues for their own sake; they were simply a means to powerful emotional ends. And he seemed to seek heightened extremes wherever he could; not for nothing did Christophers compare Victoria's musical achievement to the swirling expressionism of El Greco (whose "Nobleman with a Hand on his Chest" I chose to stand in for Victoria in the graphic above).

But then Christophers is always a bit of a period-music showman (and I mean that as high praise); he opened the concert, for instance, with a musical coup de théâtre only possible in the setting of an actual house of worship (here Harvard's handsome Memorial Church). Christophers had his sopranos begin the early plainsong Salve Regina from the atrium, so that to his audience, their floating vocal line seemed to be emanating from the walls of the nave; the effect was ethereal and haunting, like listening to an approach of angels. The piece also served, of course, as a grounding in the style which Victoria and Poulenc would develop to such heights. But while moments like these lingered in my memory as I left the concert, I also found myself wondering: what does it mean when "period" and "modern" composers seem to share so intimate a dialogue? In other words, at the end of Harry's vocal voyage, which "period" were we really in?

Detail from Zurbarán's Saint Serapion.

The reputation of the Tallis Scholars precedes them; as everyone likes to say these days, they're "the rock stars of Renaissance vocal music."  (Even though they're far too nerdy to be taken for rock stars - at least  next to the likes of Il Giardino Armonico!) And last weekend at the Church of St. Paul in Harvard Square (as part of the Boston Early Music Festival's spring concert series), the Scholars pulled a rock-star-sized crowd (the church was full to bursting), who I think were more than pleased with the singers' performance.

Still, I'm afraid I left the concert feeling that the early music field is quite crowded with "rock stars" these days, some of whom are nipping at the Scholars' heels, and a few of whom may have actually gained a slight edge in artistry.  It's not that the Tallis Scholars' musicianship (under the direction of founder Peter Philips) isn't superb; it is.  The core of their sound - pure-tone singing with near-perfect pitch - remains a wonder, and they achieve a truly consummate blend when the many vocal lines of the piece they're singing resolve back into a single chord.  Pitch-wise, nobody does polyphony like the Tallis Scholars.

But the majestic reverb of St. Paul's made it hard to judge the crispness and focus of the various singers' entrances and exits, and the group suffers from a slight, but constant, balance problem: its women are far stronger than its men, none of whom has remarkable power or truly distinctive timbre.  As a result, the sopranos dominated the mix with a force that sometimes edged toward stridency.  And I have to add that conductor Peter Philips allowed this to remain a constant - along with the Scholars' ever-meditative pace - through a wide array of quite varied sacred music; indeed, one sometimes felt that a focus on the details of a unifying technique had distracted the Scholars from the individual profiles of the pieces they were singing.

No longer the only rock stars in early music - The Tallis Scholars.

Yet in a way, the ruminative, near-harshness of the Scholars' vocals threw into high relief the emotional tone of the music they had chosen - that of Tomás Luis de Victoria and other exponents of the Spanish Counter-Reformation (as evidenced in the earthy work of Zurbarán, above, who lived at its tail end). In short, this was music to suffer by - maybe even to be martyred to.

Which isn't to say that pain can't be the source of great art - indeed, agony as an aesthetic is basically the sine qua non of the Counter-Reformation. So it's no surprise the composers of the period should have been so focused on lamentation - even the opening alleluias of Regina Caeli, a vigorous work by Francisco Guerrero, here sounded slightly lachrymose. The Scholars' musical predilections were more in synch, however, with the heartbreaking Lamentations of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Francisco de Peñalosa's Sancta Mater, and the brief but piercingly dissonant Versa es in luctum by Alonso Lobo. And the Tallis men perhaps sounded their best grounding Sebastian de Vivanco’s Magnificat Octavi Toni (I won't get into what that "Octavi Toni" means, it's complicated).

The entire second half of the program was given over to Victoria's second Requiem, which is widely considered his masterpiece.  This is the 400th anniversary of the composer's death, so in a way the work doubled as a requiem for its creator -  but its haunting hush, pierced here and there by tortured, plaintive cries, only made you wonder why we haven't heard more Victoria before now. Anguish may have never sounded so good.

But I'll have more to say on Victoria tomorrow, when I consider a second program largely devoted to his work, this one by Harry Christophers and the Handel and Haydn Society chorus.