Old music, like old movies and old books, allows us to travel back in time. For the listener, the experience of time travel can be especially vivid, since when a piece of old music is performed, it is literally recreated anew. Those notes you hear were scribbled just so by Beethoven (or whomever) way back when. His musical edifice is rebuilt, and the listener can live inside it for a while, just as listeners did back when those notes were composed.

For the opening of its subscription season, the Pacific Chorale took the listener back not just to a musical place but to a physical place as well: St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the composers in its employ created a kind of site specific music that took advantage of the cathedral’s peculiar layout and acoustical qualities. The cathedral had two organs separated in the two apses, for one thing, and it also had multiple choir galleries.

Composers began to separate the performers into these areas and write music for “cori spezzati,” or “split choirs,” one set of performers calling to or answering another. In the cathedral’s reverberant acoustics, echo effects became popular. A kind of stereophonic or surround sound music was created that enveloped the listener and penitent from all sides, the word of God made omnipresent. It must have been awe-inspiring, as was Saturday night’s concert.

The program was dubbed “Italian Treasures” and it took in a little more than a century’s worth of music, but it was nevertheless focused squarely on the thirty or so years when the cori spezzati style was the rage at St. Mark’s. Conductor John Alexander took advantage of Segerstrom Concert Hall by placing his performers in balconies and offstage, on different levels and in opposition to each other.