VOCES8, the vocal octet founded in 2005 by two brothers who were one-time choristers at Westminster Abbey, has found a profitable niche. They sing a broad range of traditional choral music, while also garnering online attention from their videos of popular songs arranged in close harmony. Think The Manhattan Transfer meets the Tallis Scholars. The group returned to Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore Sunday evening for a sold-out concert.

Complexity came in all forms. Renaissance motets, like “O Clap Your Hands” by Orlando Gibbons, offered entwined polyphonic voices, in this case eight of them. The climax of the second part, with antiphonal echoes of the phrase “Sing praises,” resounded joyfully in the stone nave. John Sheppard’s paired settings of “Libera nos” took a step backward in time to even denser contrapuntal fabric, across an astounding range of seven distinct parts, all sung with deft balance.

Later examples of the Anglican choral tradition added harmonic challenges, as in Gustav Holst’s dramatic rendition of the “Nunc dimittis,” again in eight voices, requiring the virtuosic display of one singer per part. That piece’s mixture of imposing large textures with some polyphonic activity showed up the lack of imagination in much more recent choral music, focused almost exclusively on homophonic textures, with all voices stacked vertically and not much interplay between parts.

The lead example of this modern choral style, Eric Whitacre, found his place in the program, of course. His setting of a Walt Whitman poem, “All Seems Beautiful to Me,” is one of the less saccharine works in his oeuvre, with the eight singers impeccably tuning even the most dissonant harmonies. English composer Lucy Walker’s “Give Me Your Stars,” set to a sentimental Sara Teasdale poem, felt cut from the same cloth. The evanescence of Savannah Porter’s high soprano top notes shimmered with style in these pieces.

Countertenor Barnaby Smith, who is the only founding member of the group still singing with them, serves as artistic director. In the overly long spoken introductions throughout the program, involving each singer in turn, he acknowledged the influence of the Swingle Singers, one of the early groups to mix classical and popular. Ward Swingle’s shoo-bee-doo version of a Bach Bourrée, from English Suite No. 2, gave a 1960s swish of color to the program, with the percussion parts imitated by singers.

Close harmony arrangements of folk and popular songs required similar levels of careful intonation and balance. All eight singers proved remarkably able to lighten or fortify their tone to achieve optimal balance across this broad range of styles. Kate Rusby’s “Underneath the Stars” and a maudlin arrangement of “Danny Boy” pushed the limits of sentimentality, while jazz and R&B standards like Nat King Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and Otis Blackwell’s “Fever” plumbed the depths of collegiate a cappella cliches.

More of the serious fare would have been preferable to the flimsiness of the pop repertoire on this program, which wore out its welcome in the second half. A regrettable mash-up of two tunes from James Bond films, “For Your Eyes Only” and “You Only Live Twice,” was a bad idea, as was a mediocre arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” Schubert’s strophic song “Liebe,” for four lower voices, did not present enough variety in its repetitions, and the six-part arrangement of a reconstituted Beatles song, “Free as a Bird,” failed to take flight.

A few other pieces in a similar vein unfortunately filled out the evening. The sheer number of people who purchased tickets to the performance provided its own argument, however, as did the consistently talented singers of VOCES8.

Violinist Andrew Sords, cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski, and pianist Michael Sheppard perform piano trios by Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff 6 p.m. October 27. emmanueldowntown.org

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