Music Review: Tenet Performs Couperin's Lessons for Lent | My Top ...

The soprano Montserrat Figueras, who died in November, was an important figure in the early-music world. A singer with an expressive, dark-hued voice, she often performed with her husband, the viola da gamba player Jordi Savall, and their two children.

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Tenet From left, Avi Stein on organ, the sopranos Molly Quinn and Jolle Greenleaf, Sarah Cunningham on viola da gamba and Hank Heijink on theorbo on Friday at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in a program centered on the lessons for Holy Week by Fran?ois Couperin.

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The excellent early-music ensemble Tenet dedicated a free concert at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Friday evening to Ms. Figueras. The performance also inaugurated what is projected to be an annual event focusing on French Baroque repertory written for Lent.

The concert featured Fran?ois Couperin?s ?Le?ons de T?n?bres Pour le Mercredi Saint,? three pieces for high voices and continuo that Couperin composed for Holy Week liturgies using the Latin text of the Old Testament Book of Lamentations. In Couperin?s era 15 lighted candles were placed in candelabra before the altar at the start of the ceremony; the candles would be extinguished individually until the church was completely dark. It is thought that Couperin wrote nine lessons, although only the three composed for Wednesday of Holy Week have survived.

The highlight was the Third Lesson for two soloists, sung by the sopranos Jolle Greenleaf, who is Tenet?s artistic director, and Molly Quinn. Their lovely timbres blended well and with a power that was sometimes missing from the first two lessons, where their individual voices, expressive as they were, sounded a shade too small for the large space.

The organist Avi Stein opened the program with a stirring rendition of the three-movement Suite in the Second Tone by Jean Adam Guilain, a German organist and harpsichordist who worked in Paris during the first half of the 18th century. The most enjoyable movement was the concluding ?Dialogue,? which Mr. Stein played with imaginative flair.

The concert also included three works by Marin Marais, a French composer who in 1676 was appointed a musician to the court of Versailles, where he composed many works for viol. The theorbo player Hank Heijink and the gamba player Sarah Cunningham offered soulful, elegantly wrought interpretations of three selections from Marais?s Pi?ces de Viole, Book 5, although sometimes you had to lean in to hear the intimate dialogue created by such soft-spoken instruments.

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