Organ Extravaganza

Flush with a $1-million donation, the Los Angeles Master Chorale opens its season at Disney Hall with the richly effusive 'Organ Extravaganza.'
By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic 
October 22, 2012, 5:35 p.m.  

The Los Angeles Master Chorale whooped it up Sunday night. Wouldn't you if someone just gave you a cool million dollars, as have board chairman David Gindler and his wife, Kiki? Wouldn't you want to shout out what far too few arts organizations can boast these financially dark days? In her introduction to the new season in the program booklet, Master Chorale President and Chief Executive Terry Knowles writes that the chorus stands "on the brink of a very bright future."  

And wouldn't you also feel the urge to let off a little choral steam, having just sung your soul out to produce a spiritually indispensable new recording of music by Henryk Górecki, the wrenching yet sonically irradiating Polish composer?

The celebration was the Chorale's gala season opener, titled "Organ Extravaganza," at Walt Disney Concert Hall. If much of the music was more showy than significant, blame, to some extent, the British. It was their extravagant choral tradition that the program revolved around. The Disney organ — played alternatively by Paul Meier and Kimo Smith — made a great noise. The program represented Grant Gershon's continued efforts to serve many tastes, traditional and venturesome, as he began his 12th season as music director.  

For all the happy hoopla, the evening's two outliers impressed the most. At least that is how the audience voted with its applause. These were the quiet pieces, the ones that didn't praise God with joyful exuberance but with concentrated ardor.  

The first was Arvo Pärt's "The Beatitudes," written in 1990 and the cult Estonian composer's first work in English. The text lists those counted in Matthew as blessed. The music rises slowly in pitch and volume, the organ offering a deep foundation. The chorus' concluding loud "Amen" is suddenly cut off, as if stunned by revelation, with the organ left to trace the final chord progression.  

The other outlier was Kurt Weill's "Kiddush," which provided the only Hebrew text on a program otherwise in English or liturgical Latin. Weill wrote this brief setting of the Jewish prayer for his father, a cantor, in 1946. The German composer had immigrated to the U.S. and had shifted from avant-garde populist German opera to Broadway. A very rare Weill, the "Kiddush" — for tenor, chorus and organ — adds blue notes here and there and bittersweet harmonies to a seductive chant.  

The tenor Daniel Chaney was operatic; I'd have preferred one more cantorial. But the piece is a treasure. It's hard to find on disc but easy to locate on YouTube.

And then there were the Brits — along with a young American besotted by early British choral music. Gershon did a good job of keeping the music contemporary (even if it rarely sounded such) and avoiding the commonplace.  

He also referenced the royal wedding of William and Kate, which Gershon had at least the good sense not to watch (he told the audience he had a gig). The wedding repertory included the a cappella "Ubi Caritas" by Paul Mealor, a 36-year-old Welsh composer who pleasingly updates chant with modern harmonies. Hubert Parry's enthusiastically garish classic "I Was Glad," also sung for the prince and new princess, followed, led by the chorus' associate conductor, Lesley Leighton.  

Two composers in their early 30s, one British and one American, were another part of the evening's festivities. From London came Tarik O'Regan's "Dorchester Canticles," which added tenor ( Todd Strange), harp (Jo Ann Turovsky) and percussion (Nick Terry). It was meant as a complement to Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" but proved a pale one.  

The two pieces by Nico Muhly were more interesting. The Master Chorale has recorded both Muhly's "Bright Mass With Canons" and "A Good Understanding," but this was the West Coast premiere of the latter. This meant a Disney triptych for the composer, who had a new piece included in the L.A. Dance Project program a month ago and who was also featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella program earlier in the week.  

Both Muhly works are from 2005, when the composer was still in his early 20s. The Mass has the quality of a Steve Reich mix of old English choral music — clever, bright, show-offy. "A Good Understanding" is fanciful in its details and full of beans, using both adult voices and the Los Angeles Children's Chorus, percussion and organ. Muhly, like O'Regan, sets Psalm texts, but his exuberance is not, like O'Regan's, predictable.  

The children were given another Psalm, this time a setting by a senior British composer. The kids were excellent, but it seemed rather mean to require them to memorize David Willcocks' forgettable Psalm 150.  

The concert ended with Judith Weir's "Ascending Into Heaven." After a long wait, bland music finally ascended and, in the last bars, became heavenly. The Master Chorale, however, sounded all evening like, well, a million dollars.

If the mood of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC) at its Disney Hall season premiere on Sunday was electric, it had ample reason to be. Opening its 49th season, not to mention its 12th under the charismatic leadership of Grant Gershon, the ensemble has further polished the legacy of its former director Paul Salamunovich. The suave unity of their voices, their pliant expressiveness, and vibrant color put the LAMC among elite company in the choral world.

It was a moment to celebrate then, not with solemnity but with a rousing, earthy shout. The Organ Extravaganza did just that, pulling out all the stops – both figuratively and literally.

The brilliant “God is Gone Up” from the Three Anthems, Op. 27 by the tragically short-lived Gerald Finzi, opened the program. The joyous devotion of the music belied the composer’s agnostic worldview and the Hodgkin’s disease to which he would ultimately succumb – diagnosed while working on the score.

Attracting the attention of many were the pair of works by classical music golden boy Nico Muhly. Coming hard on the heels of a Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella concert focusing on the work of the composer – with music that failed to live up to the 30-year-old’s glowing reputation and hype – the LAMC program saw the composer in better, if still mixed, light.     Best of all was his “Bright Mass with Canons” (canons as in Pachelbel, not 1812), a vibrant work equal parts New York minimalism and Francis Poulenc. The organ part, played brilliantly by Kimo Smith, quivered nervously underneath the tapestry of quasi-Baroque grandeur, producing sounds not unlike the kind heard from an eight-bit video game. Less successful was the West Coast premiere of Muhly’s “A Good Understanding,” a meandering work done in by the sort of slack-jawed, navel-gazing aesthetic that scuttled the works on the Green Umbrella program.

Another dud was Tarik O’Regan’s “Dorchester Canticles,” composed for an ensemble comprising the same combination used by Leonard Bernstein in the reduction of his “Chichester Psalms.” While the music was of a completely different sort, comparisons to the Bernstein piece were inevitable. It didn’t help that the composer, according to the program notes, conceived the work as a “complement” to the “Chichester Psalms.” If so, then O’Regan’s work only helps highlight the genius of the Bernstein work (one of the composer’s truly great compositions) – at the expense of casting the spotlight on its own vapidity and inanity.

Following a similar path was Paul Mealor’s “Ubi Caritas.” Composed for last year’s British royal wedding, its cloying, saccharine expression seemed well suited for that occasion, but perhaps not so much under more sober conditions.

Arvo Pärt’s meditative “The Beatitudes” was also not as fine as one would expect from this composer. Its repetitive, stepwise progressions quickly wore out their welcome, though the closing organ solo was more interesting and rewarding to listen to than the rest of the work that preceded it.

Closing out the program was Judith Weir’s “Ascending Into Heaven, ” another curiously pallid composition that one wish had been traded out for something more rewarding.

That impression of the Weir piece was magnified by its being cruelly juxtaposed with the miniature masterpiece of Kurt Weill’s “Kiddush,” which had immediately preceded it. Its softly undulating harmonies, tipping its hat both to the synagogue and to Broadway, made a deep impression. The piece’s tenor solo was performed with rapt expressivity by Daniel Chaney, who sculpted the piece into a miniature aria. An appropriate interpretation given the composer’s own roots in the theatre.

Throughout, the LAMC was its ever-superb self. The status as a musical institution that Los Angeles can take pride in – and the rest of the world can envy – was again proved beyond doubt.

Conductor Grant Gershon and the LA Master Chorale promised an “Organ Extravaganza” for its 49th season opener—a title which might put any audience in fear of a loud, obvious and “churchy” evening. Those, like this reviewer, who are always wary of organs, might have hesitated.

The music we heard, however, was as cerebral and challenging as it was big and exuberant. And while the selections were all religious, they were far from churchy. The organ added to the efforts of the Master Chorale—surely one of the world’s finest vocal institutions—without drowning it in “extravaganza.”

The first half opened regally with Gerald Finzi’s God is Gone Up, with words by Edward Taylor.  Finzi (1901-1956), a composer of Jewish ancestry, first studied music at Christ Church High Harrogate.  By his thirties, Finzi had lost his father, three brothers, as well as his teacher, and became an agnostic—but he would nevertheless grow into one of England’s well-loved song writers.

The organ opens the piece with fanfare, as the voices fortissimo and in unison, definitely declare a “triumphant shout.” Effective harmonic imitation follows on “singing praise,” with legato melodic soft passages on “Heaven courtiers fly,” and the opening stanza rounding out this majestic piece. Organist Paul Meier pushed the big Disney Hall organ (now just eight years old) to its limits, but without losing musical definition. Bravo.

The second piece, Bright Mass with Canons, by young composer Nico Muhly (1981-), is aailable on the La Master Chorale’s CD, “A Good Understanding” (Decca 2010).  Here the “canons” are vocal volleys, and the piece is filled with tremendous, antiphonal choral writing, and Gershon was highly clever to position the chorale in a ‘stereo’ formation with altos and sopranos standing on both sides of stage front, and men toward the back.  Like others, this reviewer did have trouble understanding the first movement’s short, rhythmic flourishes on the organ, played deftly by Kimo Smith.  These interjections didn’t seem to make sense either musically or in connection with the text. Sometimes they just seemed like interruptions to the fine choral passages.

Muhly’s unnecessary flourishes reccurred with a repetitive, almost “poplike” organ rhythm in the second movement, on the words “Thou alone art the Lord.”  These interjections gave way, however, to a most effective, echoing Sanctus, while the Agnus Dei filled the hall with great organ pedals below the antiphonal women, ending the piece peacefully –-just as the text describes.

Gershon described Estonian Arvo Part’s piece, The Beatitudes, as “introspective, but with phenomenal emotion behind it.”    This was the first piece that Part (1935-) wrote to an English text.  It is “tintinnabulation,” part of Part’s method of composing, at its best. The notes of the triad gradually unfold into rich sonorous sounds reminiscent of bells.  Here, what resulted was a slow but steady vocal crescendo of binary, homophonic proclamations with added harmonic dissonances on important words such as “mercy and “children” to an exalted ending on “Amen,” with the organ’s final rejoicing as a sort of release to the chorus’s internal combustion.  The organ then slowly descends, both sonically and figuratively.

Gershon provided excellent direction here. For example, at the climax on “Rejoice,” he aggressively stepped back and proclaimed the rejoicing from his standpoint. Faster than speeds that I’ve heard on recordings, Grant kept it moving, so the energy was enthralling.

The subject of the “Listen Up!” talk prior to the concert, and the only composer in attendance was Paul Mealor (1975-), who composed Ubi Caritas for the 2011 Royal Wedding.  The audience enthusiastically enjoyed this beautiful short a cappella piece with terrifically strong bass lines, based on, as Mealor states, “an ancient chant blended with 21st century harmonies.” The pure, angelic tone of the boy soprano on the last line of the text, “And may we love each other with a sincere heart,” was precious.

Rounding off this first half, Gershon passed the baton to the confident leadership of Associate Conductor, Lesley Leighton whose large and full direction of I was Glad by Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918) precisely clarified why this piece is used for Coronations.

The second half of the program highlighted the LA Children’s chorus in David Willcocks’ Psalm 150.  Fifty-five young singers under the terrifically precise and energetic leadership of Conductor Anne Tomlinson sung with pure, beautiful tone and diction.

The second half of the evening seemed less well formed than the first, but offered its own high points.

Tarik O’Regan (1978-), another young English composer, provided welcoming new textures with his interplay of harp, percussion and organ in his Dorchester Canticles, created reminiscently of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.  However, sometimes the instruments were overbearing here, as in the second Muhly piece played in this half.  Here too, O’Regan’s instrumental rhythmic dances seemed a little out of place.

The performance of Kurt Weill’s theatrically-inspired Kiddush was performed with excellent Hebrew pronunciation, with tenor Daniel Chaney delivering a dramatic and inspired ‘cantorial’ solo. He definitely appreciated the best applause of the night, but like many, I was wondering why this piece was selected—being so out of character with the rest of the evening. In context to the rest of the program, perhaps some other Jewish work, like the sacred Mizmorei Tehillim (Songs of Psalms) by Israeli composer Tzvi Avni would have been a better fit.

Musical chairs continued, as the choristers mixed it up for the last piece of the evening, Judith Weir’s Ascending into Heaven. Cleverly using upward glissandi in the voices, radiant harmonies, and exceptional organ playing by Paul Meier, the close provided smiles all around.

The ovation however, was fulfilled with the encore, the ever-crowd-pleasing English hymn, Come, Thou Fount—played big.  An extravaganza, indeed.