New York

The Paulist Choristers gave the second of their series of recitals. This is a valuable company. They give a capella performances -- unaccompanied chorus--of works which range from the masterpieces of the great school of medieval counterpoint to compositions of the discordant moderns. Their program for last week embraced such different names as Palestrina, Pergolesi, Archangelsky. The director is Father Finn, choirmaster of New York's great church of the Paulist order. He is a fine, genial fellow, a learned musician and, one guesses, a lively hand with a pair of boxing gloves. He formed the chorus in the normal process of training a church choir of boys and men, and has schooled them to a high degree of expertness in the rare and difficult art of unaccompanied singing. He has recruited his singers from his parish. The Church is at 59th Street and Ninth Avenue and the parish embraces some of the rudest and roughest blocks of New York's West Side, traditional as a region of brick and fist fighting rather than aesthetic cultivation. The boys are largely street urchins, sons of longshoremen and bricklayers. They quarrel and scamper on sidewalks and in back yards. But on occasion they put on their cassocks and cottas and, either in church or at formal recitals in concert halls, intone the deep and learned complexities of polyphonic music such as gives the greatest delight to the ears of the erudite.