By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • December 15, 2014

You didn’t have to be a fan of El Greco to enjoy the National Gallery of Art’s musical homage to the Spanish Renaissance painter on Sunday evening. (The gallery is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the painter’s death.) In fact, the concert was more a foil to El Greco’s thundering religious intensity than a reflection of it, with the Baltimore Consort presenting a colorful, wide-ranging program of Renaissance music that was long on charm and cheerfully short on religious fervor.

Much of that charm came from the music itself, a collection of secular romances, dances and popular songs known as villancicos that would have been popular around the turn of the 17th century, when El Greco lived in Spain. Drawn largely from court songbooks of the time, the program wove tender love songs together with virtuosic instrumental works and comic songs from such composers as Juan del Encina, Alonso Mudarra and Diego Ortiz (and, of course, the ubiquitous “Anonymous”), with superb playing from the consort’s virtuosi, particularly Ronn McFarlane on lute and Mindy Rosenfeld on flute and recorder.

But it was Brazilian countertenor José Lemos who really stole the spotlight. Lemos was front and center for most of the evening, bringing a light touch, engaging wit and perfect control to everything he sang, from the flirtatious “Yo me soy la morenica” to Juan del Encina’s comical “Cucú, Cucú, Cucucú.” The gallery’s West Garden Court tends to swallow soft-voiced Renaissance instruments — viols and baroque guitars are no match for its swampy acoustics — but Lemos set his voice perfectly against the consort players, bringing deep feeling and a deft, improvisatory freshness to the music.