The Temple of Dendur was transformed into the Temple of Athena on Friday evening as the all male a cappella choir Chanticleer presented a program of works entitled “Women Saintly and Otherwise.” The power and scope of religion as well as the history and future of Catholic Europe are much in the news these days, and so this program of portraits both sacred and profane, which encompassed music from the 15th through the 21st centuries, seemed especially relevant. As a musical whole, the evening offered, shall I say, an unusual experience.

The reconstructed Egyptian structure is housed in a section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that best replicates an airplane hangar. The acoustics are absolutely awful for a solo singer and piano accompanist, as the sound tends to drift into the ether rather quickly and return as an echo rather late. The recent recital by Olga Borodina is a case in point. This masterful singer conquered the gigantic room by lowering her prodigious volume almost to a whisper, allowing the reverberation to become her ally.

Miraculously, however, these parabolic effects were just the ticket for music originally written for the cathedrals of Europe. Not only did Chanticleer produce, in the main, a pleasant sound, but it returned to us periodically on the wings of angels. For once, the venue was apt.

My quarrel with the group was more of a stylistic one. Although they were spot-on in their spirited and emotionally intense reading of four stanzas from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Sestina,” they did not significantly vary their histrionic or vocalizing touch for earlier plainchant or a motet by Josquin Desprez. John Paul II taught us much about the triumph of humility over self-aggrandizement, but these voices did not respond with the proper self-effacement for simple, monastic music.

Additionally, I found the voices somewhat wrong in spots. Chanticleer has a dozen 20-something singers, ranging from soprano to bass. The pitch control in the higher parts were handled reasonably well. But there was considerable strain in more than one isolated passage. The timbre of the adult, polished voice – and therefore the ability to transport – was not nearly as effective as a boy’s treble would have been.

Each individual vocal excursion was fine, but the group seemed to recognize that the homogeneity of sound and mood can lead to the soporific. They have devised methods to spice up the program for a more rounded evening. One of these artificial devices is to hand out a program with many more entries listed than will actually be performed, the choir supposedly choosing at the last minute what to intone. This added a little mystery and gamesmanship to the proceedings but left this listener feeling a bit cheated, as one of my favorites, Francis Poulenc, was promised but not delivered.

Another avenue for minimizing the sameness factor is to have differing members of the troupe announce the numbers. This seemingly harmless device led to some less-than-professional moments, however, as the speakers could not resist a little amateur dramatics in their zeal for audience acceptance. There is also rather minimal and awkward choreography, for example, a funeral procession that was both clunky and unnecessary.

All of this leads me to my real dissatisfaction with this concert, which was the vulgarization and profanation of the old texts by presenting them in a theater-in-the-round atmosphere, which asked for and received a boisterous amount of applause (I appeared to be the only member of this audience who didn’t love the show). Singing two Ave Marias, one in anonymous plainsong and then one in polyphonic responsive style – this by Tomas Luis de Victoria – and having them interspersed with applause was terribly disconcerting: In this format, is nothing sacred?

Not that there were not fine performances intermingled throughout. The modern was represented by works of Ravel as well as popular songs and spirituals, and the contemporary by Emily Dickinson settings of Augusta Read Thomas. Especially interesting, with the noted exception of the cartoon procession, was the set presenting three distinct types of expressions of grief. The Monteverdi was sensually funereal, a beautiful woman outfitted in a revealing mourning cloak, and was followed by a rare nineteenth century revisiting of the old madrigal form by Robert Lucas Pearsall, most notable for its outrageous dissonances that were only permitted in that era under the guise of imitation of the old styles. This particular set ended with “Song for Athene” by Sir John Tavener, a relevant and powerful example of a rebirth of religion and spiritualism in our own day, most familiar as music employed at the service for Princess Diana.