The New Yorker | 12/30/2018 | Goings On About Town
Every year, TENET—a group of singers who apply matching passion and precision to early repertoire—performs Monteverdi’s sublime Vespers, a watershed in sacred and dramatic music in which erotic yearning, divine rage, and transcendental wonder are revealed as parts of the same whole. It’s a work that bears repeating, whether or not the listener shares its creator’s beliefs. TENET gives two performances, with a pair of enticing concerts in between at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church: a program of rarely heard music written by (and for) Italian nuns and a selection of sixteenth-century Spanish songs and dances, performed by the vocal ensemble Blue Heron and the sackbuts and cornettos of the Dark Horse Consort.