By Wynne Delacoma, Classical Music Critic

Mel Gibson has spent much of the winter in Italy directing "Passion,'' a film focusing on the last 12 hours of Christ's life. The actor is so committed to authenticity that there's talk of releasing it without subtitles for its Aramaic and Latin dialogue.

If Gibson wants an equally authentic soundtrack, he won't have to look much further than "Ancient Echoes,'' a recently issued CD by the Texas-based San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Like those recordings of medieval Gregorian chant that transfixed millions a decade or so ago, this is a haunting disc of exotic-sounding music.

Working with bits and pieces of ancient texts and material in a groundbreaking study of Jewish music published between 1914 and 1933, the seven-member ensemble returns to the air the kind of music that wafted through Middle Eastern temples and palaces during Christ's day but has been virtually unheard for more than two millennia.

SAN ANTONIO VOCAL ARTS ENSEMBLE When: 7 p.m. Sunday Where: Ascension Church, 815 S. East, Oak Park Admission: Free Call: (708) 848-2703

Recorded in Chicago last July by World Library Publications, a major publisher of religious materials based in Schiller Park, "Ancient Echoes'' is a combination of newly composed music and melodies traced back to the centuries just before and after Christ's birth. The new pieces are written by Christopher Moroney, a performer and composer who joined the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble at its inception in 1989 and became its artistic director in 1992. (The group will perform Sunday at Ascension Church in Oak Park.)

The ensemble started out as an a cappella group specializing in medieval and Renaissance-era music, but gradually added instruments to the musical mix. From the start, 16th and 17th century music from Latin America's Spanish colonial period also was high on its radar, hardly surprising for a group based in south Texas. But even for such an eclectic ensemble, music from Jerusalem at the time of Christ was a stretch.

"This is actually an idea that goes way back, to my teens when I heard some recordings of Egyptian music," Moroney said. "I was really interested to know what music might have sounded like from that area of the world in the first century. I was just starting to get interested in early music, and my interest was sparked. But at that time, I just figured it couldn't be done.''

Over the years, he and his wife, Covita Moroney, also a singer and instrumentalist with the ensemble, kept talking about the idea but never felt they had enough resource material to work with. In late 1999, a friend lent them a book with new translations of prayers and sayings of Jesus taken from an Aramaic version of the Bible.

"There were a lot of metaphors and images that came through that you don't get in a literal translation such as the King James version of the Bible, which is from the Greek," he said. "We were very moved, and once we saw these translations, we knew we could at least have some kind of first-century text.''

They started collecting Middle Eastern instruments--the lute-like oud, wind instruments including the shabbabah and mijwiz, assorted harps and string instruments--and studying the folk music of the Middle East. There also were lessons in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.

But nailing down the sound of Jewish music from 2,000 years ago was more difficult. Jewish and Arabic music was essentially an oral tradition, as Arabic music still is. Nobody wrote down songs in musical notation for future generations to learn. As Jewish rituals changed after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., and Jews dispersed throughout the world, the music they passed on through the centuries took on tinges of the new worlds around them.

"Ancient Echoes" basic musical material comes from melodies transcribed by Abraham Z. Idelsohn, a Russian-born, German-raised musicologist who traveled the world, including Palestine and the Middle East, in the first decades of the 20th century to research, record and notate Jewish music. He found common melodic and rhythmic elements in the Jewish music he was hearing whether in Russia or Syria, the former territories of ancient Babylon or Spain.

"Idelsohn thought this pointed back to a time before the Jews were dispersed after the destruction of the Second Temple,'' Moroney said. "He thought those musical motifs and phrases were distinctly Hebrew, that they didn't fit into any other ethnic tradition.''

Think "Fiddler on the Roof,'' and you'll recognize Idelsohn's 2,000-year-old Hebrew musical tradition. The music in "Ancient Echoes,'' however, has a polish and a serenity that reaches back to a sophisticated, even urbane, civilization inhabiting a far different world than Teyve's shtetl.

Accounts from the time of Christ describe what instruments were played and how many singers were used. But the ensemble had to rely on 21st century technology to re-create some of the first century effects during its weeklong recording sessions at a studio on Chicago's North Side.

"There were 12 male singers with the Levites, nine types of lyres, two harps, one cymbal and a boy's choir," Moroney said. "Since the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble only has three men, we overdubbed three times to get those numbers. We have four women, and I had them sing in very straight tones, like boys, and overdubbed them. We also had to overdub some of the lyres.''

Women were not allowed to sing in the temple, but the ensemble's women are featured on some of the "Ancient Echoes'' cuts, based on music heard in Middle Eastern palaces or elsewhere outside the temple.

The ensemble has performed some of the pieces in concert recently, and World Library Publications, a division of J.S. Paluch Publishers, is handling distribution of "Ancient Echoes'' as well as the ensemble's earlier discs of Spanish colonial music.

"The material seemed like such a fascinating topic to get into,'' said Mary Beth Kunde-Anderson, editorial director of World Library Publications, a division of J.S. Paluch Publishers. "We're a company about spiritual formation and worship, and we thought this would be a good spiritual and artistic project to support.

"And even for those who might not want to get too much into [matters of] spirituality or scholarship, it's just beautiful music.''