Ensemble P.A.N. Takes Flight, With Touch of Jazz

Ensemble P.A.N., which sang about angels at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena Sunday, is one of the country’s best avant-garde music groups. It is also its most unusual, since its idea of the avant-garde goes back not decades but centuries.

P.A.N. stands for Project Ars Nova, and the Ars Nova was the period in music when the Middle Ages waned, when pestilence and war decimated Europe, yet the human spirit soared inmusic, as if on the wings of angels.

Music in the 14th century was new, fresh, different. Sacred music was more lush and beautiful than it had ever been. Secular music became lusty, direct and wonderfully tuneful. The two realms, moreover, were always getting themselves entangled. And consequently “Angeli: The Wind Was in Their Wings,” the Boston-based early music group’s offering for Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites, described spirits luminous but also startlingly sensual.

Angels, of course, aren’t confined to historic periods, and Ensemble P.A.N. was in an expansive mood. Founders mezzo-soprano Laurie Monahan and countertenor Michael Collver were joined by Monahan’s four-woman group, Tapestry, and two more guest vocalists. The musical eras, too, were expanded--indeed most was earlier or later than Ars Nova. But the spirit of that avant-garde age pervaded the performances and gave them their considerable soul.

Perhaps the best way to get a sense of what is remarkable about this ensemble is to focus on one piece, “Sanctus Christe yerarchia,” an undated and unsigned score from Notre Dame in Paris, where Ars Nova flourished. Collver sang a solo line against drones held by the other singers. He is an extroverted countertenor with the timbre of a soprano saxophone. And there is only one angel I could think of who might have supplied Collver with his spellbinding tone, his rhapsodic flights of fancy, his heroic soprano sound and his intricate coloratura ornamentation all in the service of shinning, ecstatic melody. And that is John Coltrane, the great jazz player.

Equally like jazz--say, Coltrane playing “Greensleeves”--Ensemble P.A.N. makes you think only of the here and now, no matter from where or when the music came. There was some very old chant, and also a couple of new pieces from Patricia Van Ness, a Boston composer who uses modern technology--experimental forms of notation--to produce results that sound not unlike Ars Nova.

Hildegard von Bingen knew a lot about angels nine centuries ago, and she, too, was represented. The arching, aching lines of her “O vos Angeli” were beautifully sung by the women in unison, out of which came a couple of stunning solo excursions into the stratosphere by Cristi Catt that were as radiant and exciting as any singing I’ve heard all season.

It was thanks to his understanding of the way the modern world works that Collver was also able to include angelic examples of Eastern European chant from Georgia. There is a large repertory of this ancient music that was suppressed by the Soviets, and still remains on old parchment in cloisters, never published. Collver told us he found it on the Internet, on a site maintained by the Georgian republic.