Vox Renaissance Consort’s Renaissance Candlemas

The costumes could look like a second-rate stunt in the wrong hands. Combined with first-class, knowledgeable music-making, they always add something magical to the mix. At events like the consort’s annual Christmas concerts, they create the illusion you really are watching a court musical fete.

Their Candlemas concert at the Cathedral Basilica didn’t reproduce a Renaissance Candlemas service — the traditional February celebration of the divine light. For one thing, expensively dressed aristocrats wouldn’t have been singing in the choir at a Renaissance church service. But the costumes still added moving overtones.

Radu opened the event with a prelude played by six instrumentalists dressed in white shirts, black pants, and high boots — timeless costumes that suggest Central European peasants. The vocalists entered from the rear of the performance area, in couples, like visiting time travelers — or ghosts, if your imagination prefers that kind of imagery. At the end of the concert, they retreated in the same way, fading into the past.

Radu arranged the singers in a broad semicircle behind the instruments, women on the left and men on the right — a setup that let him bring out the polyphony in the music. The great choral works of later periods awe us with monumental grandeur; this music works with other values. The 16th-century alleluia at the end of the first set achieved its effects with speed, lilt, and good-natured, countrylike exchanges between the men and women. Henry Purcell’s Rejoice in the Lord celebrated with fast tempos, the rolling lilt of the rhythm, and more interplay between the voices. The arrangement of Now Thank We All Our God at the end started with the familiar tune sung as fast as a dance piece and ended with the women singing it at a stately tempo while the men maintained a pulsing counterpoint.

Radu, as usual, delivered spoken notes, dotted with odd bits of humor, from the podium. But the honors for wit go to the first violin. Robert Spates made the best cell phone announcement of the season when he crouched like a medieval jester and jabbed at his phone with his finger, mingling the old with the new, the ancient rustic humor of the mime with the 21st-century slab in his left hand.