50th Season Celebration
Sep 22, 2013 - 7:00 PM
The Indispensable Art of Choral Music: Celebrating the Los Angeles Master Chorale
by Thomas May“When people wish to express their innermost thoughts and dreams, they sing — and when they sing together, it is called choral music,” writes Nick Strimple at the end of his acclaimed history of this art form in the twentieth century. Despite all the competing sources of musical pleasure that abound in our post-postmodern era, choral music “continues as an indispensable ingredient in Earth’s cultural fabric.”
During the course of a half century’s worth of making music, the Los Angeles Master Chorale has brought people together to give a shared human voice to these thoughts and dreams — for singers and audiences alike — and has made itself indispensable in the process. A tally over those years of 527 performances and 88 premieres (57 of them world premieres) represents an extraordinary record of indispensability: to the cultural life of its home city, to the preservation of choral music’s rich legacy and to innovation of the art by promoting significant contemporary composers and discovering hidden musical gems.
Tonight we look back on these achievements and celebrate the phases and facets that have shaped the Chorale’s identity. The program is divided into four sets, each highlighting the respective personalities of the ensemble’s four music directors. Above all, though, the tremendous range of styles, techniques and varieties of musical meaning on offer this evening is a tribute to the versatile — and indispensable — artistry of these singers.
A Chorale Is Born
The idea that gave birth to the Chorale became a concrete reality with the inaugural concert of January 27, 1965, which featured Bach’s B minor Mass. This coincided with the establishment of the Los Angeles Music Center in the early 1960s. But it actually all began nearly thirty years before that, when a visionary young conductor named Roger Wagner (1914-1992), freshly appointed as Music Director of LA’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, launched his first fledgling choir and, with it, a career devoted to choral conducting that would leave a deep and lasting impression on the history of choral music.
Within less than a decade, in 1946, he had organized the Los Angeles Concert Youth Chorus, from which emerged the Roger Wagner Chorale. Through widespread touring and media presence (radio and television broadcasts as well as many recordings, winning a Grammy with the album Virtuoso! in 1958), the Roger Wagner Chorale gained international recognition. Locally it became an integral part of the city’s musical life by performing regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Wagner laid the organizational groundwork for LAMC by incorporating the Southern California Choral Music Association in 1962, using the Hollywood Bowl Association and The Southern California Symphony Association as models; Z. Wayne Griffin was elected President. In 1993 Donald J. Nores, now an emeritus member of the LAMC Board of Directors, headed an historical committee to dig into the facts regarding this foundational period. He observes that Wagner’s guiding idea had been “to form an organization to promote choral music and to establish a chorale which would perform the great choral masterworks to the highest musical standards in a season of its own.”
This project suddenly gained momentum when Wayne Griffin forged a bridge between Wagner and members of the LA Junior Chamber of Commerce. They approached Dorothy Chandler as the first phase of the new Music Center was nearing completion in 1964, and she encouraged their proposal of a choral institution that would enjoy the status of a resident company of the Music Center alongside the Philharmonic. (These would be joined by the Center Theatre Group in 1967 and, in 1986, by Los Angeles Opera, while the erstwhile Civic Light Opera ceased operation in 1987.) In an interview with Don Richardson for radio station KCRW’s “Behind the Scenes” journal, Wagner himself recalled that, as part of the new Music Center, he wanted to found an organization “that could be compared vocally with the LA Philharmonic in both its presentation and its goals.”
From the start, then, thanks to this fortuitous convergence of goals, LAMC was a rare animal. None of the other major cultural centers from this era — notably the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center — assigned a comparably prominent role to choral music. By founding an independent professional choral company to collaborate with the Philharmonic while at the same time offering a season of its own, Wagner in effect created an entirely “new genre,” as Vance George terms it in his chapter on choral conducting in The Cambridge Companion to Conducting.
An avid enthusiast of singing in liturgical Latin, Wagner briefly considered “Schola Cantorum” as the ensemble’s name before everyone agreed on the less-forbidding “Los Angeles Master Chorale.” Nores reports that the organization started out with a modest office in the Chamber Building on Bixel Street consisting of a single desk, filing cabinet and a rented typewriter. Brochures for the inaugural season announced a subscription price in the Orchestra and Founders sections of $25 (no, that’s not a typo). Incidentally, the Chorale now celebrates its 50th season, but that first one began in January rather than the fall (and ended in April). If you try to reckon the anniversary purely by arithmetic, you’ll get caught up in a situation similar to the one you’ll recall from around the millennium, when we were fretting over when the last century technically ended and the present one began.
The Roger Wagner Era: 1964-1986
Could there be a more appropriate way to kick off tonight’s program than with the Ave Maria of Tomás Luis da Vittoria (c. 1548-1611)? This two-part motet, a setting of the beautiful prayer to the Virgin by the great Spanish composer of Renaissance sacred music, was one of Wagner’s well-known signatures as a conductor. Ron Long, who sang with the Chorale under his tenure, points out that “Roger had begun more than 2,500 Roger Wagner Chorale concerts with the Gregorian setting, after which he merged immediately” into Vittoria’s motet. He recalls one Monday rehearsal when a French conductor stopped in to visit and heard them sing the Ave Maria. “We all knew it by memory. When we finished and everyone was walking out…I overheard him say, ‘Yes, but how does he get that sound?’”
One of its sources, according to Wagner himself, was his long exposure to the Catholic Church’s sacred music tradition. “My ideal of sound,” he remarked in his interview on KCRW, is closely connected to the “purity of sound in church choirs and in Renaissance music.” Clarity and a homogeneous blend — in place of a distractingly “excessive vibrato” — feature prominently. When discussing his process for auditioning singers, Wagner said he always looked for a special kind of voice capable of fitting into a group and would turn down someone like Maria Callas or Franco Corelli, because their distinctive style of singing would stick out.
Music Director Grant Gershon describes the hallmark Roger Wagner sound as “an extremely balanced, resonant, full-bodied choral sound that’s very sensuous and rich in quality.” As to its subtlety, William Lyon Lee, who sang in the early years, recalls that “Roger was one of very few musicians attuned to not only the notes sung but the overtones usually only heard by the best musicians.”
Wagner’s background naturally shaped his conception of an ideal choral sound. A nod to his French roots is heard in Il est bel et bon by Pierre Passereau (fl. 1509-1547). Its patter rhythms and witty, playfully virtuoso musical onomatopoeia make this a delightful example of the secular Parisian chanson. Written by a priest and cathedral singer who makes an appearance in the pages of Rabelais, the piece became immensely popular and appears in several editions throughout the sixteenth century.
Born in Le Puy, France, in the fateful year of 1914 (his centenary will fall on January 16), Wagner first studied music with his father, the cathedral organist in Dijon. A different but related trait — Wagner’s penchant for theatricality — must have been encouraged by countless hours listening and fantasizing while his father accompanied silent movies at the Happy Hour Theater in Syracuse, New York. Wagner moved with his family to the U.S. while he was still a boy and followed along his father’s path by commencing his career as a church organist.
After graduate study in France and in Montreal (where he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the pivotal Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez), Wagner made the leap from playing organ to choral conducting. Paul Salamunovich points out that Wagner earned his first position as music director at St. Joseph’s “because of his talents as an accomplished organist and not because of his choral ability” — in fact, up until then he had acquired “no formal training or experience in this area. But within a few short months, spurred on by a special ambition, confidence and drive, this self-taught ‘by trial-and-error’ conductor” formed his first choir.
The Chorale’s inaugural season reflected Wagner’s devotion to presenting masterpieces of the choral tradition — Bach’s B minor Mass and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven (with Robert Shaw as guest conductor) — along with his love of early music. In March came a “Festival of 16th- and 17th-Century Music.” Gershon remarks that his predecessor had “a passionate feeling for early music” and was among the first to champion rediscovery of the neglected treasury of Renaissance music — including a revival of the Monteverdi Vespers. While he was in some ways identifiably “a musician of his time and era, Roger could also be seen as forwardthinking in his programming. The Chorale did a lot of new music during his era.”
The representative example of the latter that we hear is “Kyrie/Sally Gardens” from the Missa Carminum Brevis (an abridged version of the original Missa Carminum) of American composer Paul Chihara (born in 1938). Specially commissioned for the Chorale’s American Bicentennial program in January 1976 (which included guest appearances by Aaron Copland to conduct and Jimmy Stewart as narrator), this music was conceived as part of a “folk-song Mass” uniting popular idioms with liturgical tradition. Chihara, who dedicated the Missa to Roger Wagner and the Chorale, wrote of his desire to identify “sacred with profane love” in “a transformation which heightens religious devotion.” He chose a different folk song to serve as cantus firmus for each movement (hence “Sally Gardens”), combining these with Gregorian incipits and the choral style and texture of Palestrina’s Masses as a model.
Filling out LAMC’s first season were the Texas Boys’ Choir in a guest concert of classical and folk pieces and a concert presentation of Rossini’s opera Moses in its first-ever West Coast performance. Already several branches of the Chorale’s activity in years to come are in evidence: the interest in vernacular and popular choral traditions and the urge to rescue forgotten or undervalued scores for new generations of music lovers. Gershon observes that it proved especially challenging to whittle down the selections for this opening set in a way that gives a reasonable portrait of the Wagner years, since “his tastes were remarkably eclectic, and he was associated with so many styles and trends.”
One of these is Wagner’s gift for making effective choral arrangements of folk music and more popular genres, as we hear in his treatments of the Stephen Foster standard I Dream of Jeanie, the potpourri of cowboy tunes in Western Songs and Danny Boy, the seemingly timeless ballad to the Irish “Londonderry Air” with words by English lyricist Frederic Weatherly. Wagner enjoyed close ties with Capitol Records and was commissioned to put together complementary albums called Songs of the Old World and Songs of the New World. Nick Strimple emphasizes that his widely circulated arrangements of folk songs and spirituals had a huge impact on choral groups in high schools and colleges. Wagner also understood the significance of his colleague William Levi Dawson’s (1899- 1990) contributions in preparing high-quality, authentic editions of spirituals (which we sample in his rousing arrangement of Ev’ry time I feel the spirit).
Already by 1967 LAMC was an ensemble to be reckoned with. Reviewing the Yule Concert in 1967, the critic Martin Bernheimer — not exactly known as a pushover — declared that “everyone should know by now that Wagner’s 100-odd singers, when on form, represent a vocal organization with few peers.” Finding them “decidedly on form” in this performance, Bernheimer praised the ensemble’s “richness of tone, counterbalanced by astonishing flexibility of texture and dynamics.”
The John Currie Era: 1986-1991
Wagner remained Music Director laureate until his death in 1992 — surviving an alarming hemorrhage which occurred while he was conducting a live performance of music from Gounod’s Faust in February 1987. But after the Chorale’s first two decades, he yielded the reins to John Currie, a native of Prestwick, Scotland. The 51-year-old Currie had led the Scottish National Orchestra Chorus and Edinburgh Festival Chorus, bringing a background that favored using the Chorale in large-scale choral-symphonic compositions like Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and the canonical Requiem settings. Even the programs devoted to Scottish folk music that became one of his hallmarks tended to be outsize extravaganzas featuring hefty orchestral accompaniments, with all the bells and whistles (and bagpipes and drums).
Inevitably, almost every great institution undergoes a period of turbulent transition as it reconsiders and moves away from the identity established by its founder. This is part of the natural life cycle of cultural organizations as much as of individuals. Supporters of Wagner’s ideals became pitted against those aligned with Currie’s new vision. The sense of controversy emerges clearly enough from the critics’ paper trail.
One camp claimed that Currie had “dismantled the Wagner sound into an amorphous, less well-defined blend.” But not all the critics agreed. In his LA Times review of Currie’s farewell concert in 1991 (at the end of his fifth season), Daniel Cariaga marveled at the mastery of his performance of Mozart’s Requiem: “Every part of this sometimes disjunct work seemed to connect to every other part. The totality moved forward, from the stoic beginning to the transcendent close, in an apprehendable linearity.” As entrée into the Requiem, the program included Mozart’s motet setting of the Ave verum corpus (in D major to the Requiem’s D minor and also a product of his miraculous final year in 1791, the 200th anniversary of which was being commemorated). The profoundly affecting, pared-down essence Mozart captures in this music would prove moving indeed when Grant Gershon programmed the same work on his inaugural program in memory of the victims of the recent terrorist attack of 9/11.
Along with Mozart, the folk music of his native Scotland was another Currie specialty. In this he not only continued the thread of folk-related exploration already started by Wagner but pointed ahead to trends that the Chorale has continued to evolve in the years since. We hear two examples of this repertory: Mack Wilberg’s settings of the traditional My Love’s in Germany and I’ll Ay Call in by Yon Town. When Currie presided over an entire program of Scottish folk arrangements as part of his first season, Cariaga found that “these tunes filled an evening with joyous or melancholy feelings skillfully projected by 62 singers of the chorale, vigorously led by Currie,” who also supplied “brief but pointed spoken introductions.”
Another critic, Richard S. Ginnell, compared the popularity of this fare to that of the Messiah sing-alongs instituted under Wagner. (Currie even sported a tartan when he reappeared after intermission.) The Scotsman’s classical training, according to Ginnell, in fact enhances what are sophisticated arrangements. He cites a couple of Currie-fied songs that allow listeners to “latch onto the tunes…and still savor the busy strands of winds circulating in and out of the texture.”
The Paul Salamunovich Era: 1991-2001
In the spring of 1939, native Angeleno Paul Salamunovich — the Chorale’s Music Director Emeritus — had an opportunity to listen to Roger Wagner and his first choir of men and boys, which had debuted only a year before. The setting was a small Catholic parish church in Redondo Beach, and, as Salamunovich recalls, he never forgot the beautiful impression their singing of Gregorian chant made on his 11-year-old ears. It was his first encounter with “the overwhelming charisma and strength of the conductor,” he writes, adding that he “reveled in the sheer beauty of the singing.”
Within a few years, after his family had moved to Hollywood, Salamunovich himself began singing in the choir of Blessed Sacrament Church, where the director was Richard Keys Biggs, Wagner’s own former organ teacher. Salamunovich was eventually able to sing directly under Wagner, becoming one of “those lucky choir boys” whose rendition of Gregorian chant had so impressed him. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy right out of high school, he returned to Los Angeles and joined Wagner’s newly established Concert Youth Chorus, which became the Roger Wagner Chorale.
Salamunovich sang with the ensemble on the soundtrack recorded for Joan of Arc, the 1948 Victor Fleming film starring Ingrid Bergman, which marked the Roger Wagner Chorale’s first professional engagement. Their partnership with the LA Philharmonic began soon thereafter, and their activities quickly expanded as the singers took on more recording projects (a celebrated account of Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass for the Capitol Records label in 1951) and even international tours, including an invitation to participate in the festival for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
For a concert LAMC gave in 1999 celebrating its history and the legacy of its founder, Salamunovich wrote a heartfelt tribute to this life-changing mentor: “Because of his great talent and productivity, Roger Wagner can be given a great deal of credit for what I believe to have been the ‘Golden Age of Choral Music’ [in] the 40s, 50s, and 60s—and he has been acknowledged as one of the giants in this field.” He further emphasized what he had absorbed from Wagner: “May I be so bold as to say I reflect the training personally received from his gifts.”
The widely traveled Salamunovich meanwhile developed a formidable reputation of his own as director for six decades of the St. Charles Borromeo Choir in North Hollywood. His St. Charles Choir sang at the Vatican, appeared on various popular television programs, and — most famously of all — recorded the unforgettable Sherman brothers’ tune “It’s a Small World” for Disneyland Park. Salamunovich has meanwhile left his stamp on generations of musicians through his influential career as a music professor and director of choral activities at Loyola Marymount University, where he remains Professor Emeritus of Music, as well as through his other academic positions and the choral workshops he has led around the world.
And of course Salamunovich has exerted a formative influence on the sound and artistry of the Chorale, serving in varying capacities since the group was established. After singing as one of the original members, Salamunovich contributed as assistant conductor to Wagner between 1953 and 1977 — a task which entailed preparing the Chorale for some of its most legendary performances with the Philharmonic.
“I’m sort of like the prodigal son, come back,” said Salamunovich in the Music Center press conference announcing his return to the Chorale as its new Music Director in 1991.
Writing about the changing of the guard in the LA Times, John Henken reported that the conductor was “very much aware that he returns to the Master Chorale at a difficult time for the organization and for choral music generally in this country.”
As a remedy, Salamunovich essentially returned to the founding values of Roger Wagner — and to the musical ideals on which the Chorale had built its identity. Grant Gershon points out that, with regard to the Chorale’s early music repertoire, this meant a greater focus on chant and more attention to the antecedents of the great Renaissance flourishing of choral music. We therefore begin this set with the chant setting of the early medieval Catholic hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus (traditionally attributed to a ninth-century archbishop but likely dating earlier). Closely associated with the Christian feast of Pentecost — celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles 50 days after the Easter Resurrection — Veni, Creator Spiritus is also a fitting ode to the creative spirit, as Gustav Mahler well knew when he chose to set this text as the cantata-like first movement of his Eighth Symphony.
Salamunovich moreover enhanced his practical performance skills with an immense scholarly understanding of church music. Covering an a cappella program in March 1993, the critic Donna Perlmutter admired his connoisseur-like ability to trace out connections and parallels between early music and the choral literature of later centuries: “By its end, few could doubt his belief that the human voice is the most perfect and versatile of instruments.”
That program had opened with Palestrina’s (c. 1525-1594) splendidly ceremonial six-part motet on Tu es Petrus (1572), the New Testament text about Peter as “the rock” on which the church would be founded. The composer’s recent appointment as music director of St. Peter’s in Rome adds another dimension to the exuberance of his setting.
The pairing of Palestrina and Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) meanwhile represents a lovely example of the sorts of historical interconnections Salamunovich so persuasively draws. The modern French composer’s catalogue of choral works is small but endures at the center of the repertoire. One of these, Four Motets (1960), draws on Gregorian chant to transcend the span of centuries up to Duruflé’s own. We hear two of these: Tu es Petrus and the lucidly shaped Ubi caritas, to a text associated with the liturgy of Holy Thursday on the eve of Good Friday.
A modern setting of a timeless text occasioned what can plausibly be claimed as the single most memorable moment in the Salamunovich era. It was part of the “Home for the Holidays” program of December 18, 1994. In her memoir of life as a choir singer, Imperfect Harmony, Stacy Horn sets the scene of the premiere of O Magnum Mysterium in the setting by Morten Lauridsen (born in 1943): “Salamunovich turned around and… spoke directly to the audience. If anyone had asked him who his favorite composer was, he told them, he would have said Tomás Luis da Vittoria. Vittoria’s O Magnum Mysterium remains as fresh as the day it was written. ‘Tonight, you’re about to hear the world premiere of the twentieth-century counterpart.’” Horn adds that within three years, this popular breakthrough for Lauridsen would become the highest-selling item in the catalogue of his publisher Peermusic’s distributor, Theodore Presser, ever since the company had been founded in 1783.
Lauridsen, who would soon begin his term as LAMC Composer in Residence (which he served from 1995 to 2001), wrote O Magnum Mysterium on a commission from then-Board Chair Marshall Rutter, a co-founder of the Chorale who had been elected to the very first Board back in 1964. Rutter’s request was intended as a Christmas present for his wife, Terry Knowles, LAMC’s current President.
The original Latin text that has moved so many composers over the centuries conveys, within the space of a mere 23 words, the central paradox around which the Christmas miracle pivots: the manifestation of the divine takes place not among the elite but is the privilege of the most humble to witness and cherish. Lauridsen translates this sense of unfathomable wonder into music of profound serenity in his radiant, perfectly proportioned setting for the unadorned human voice. Try topping that for a holiday gift!
The spiritual Hold On! embodies yet another kind of timelessness — we hear the expert arrangement by Jester Hairston (1901-2000) — while the anthem setting The Lord Bless You and Keep You (1981) by John Rutter (born in London in 1945) became a beloved signature encore piece of the Chorale under Salamunovich’s tenure.
The Grant Gershon Era: 2001-present
“This will be an ensemble to watch.” So wrote the LA Times’ current music critic, Mark Swed, in his enthusiastic report on LAMC’s first concert under the fourth music director in its history. In spite of the terrible shadow of 9/11 which loomed over that fall in 2001, a sense of change and renewal was circulating amid the American cultural landscape at the turn of the millennium. Swed remarked on the difference made by Kent Nagano in his first venture as principal conductor at LA Opera — he had just inaugurated his term with a new Lohengrin directed by the actor Maximilian Schell — and pointed to other new assignments around the country (Robert Spano in Atlanta, Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony).
“But none has gone so far as Grant Gershon in putting into practice a radical new vision,” Swed concluded on the basis of that Saturday night program on September 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He drew attention to Gershon’s commitment to living composers — the concert closed with Philip Glass’s Itaipú, a big piece for chorus and orchestra juxtaposing a creation myth passed down by the Guarani Indians with their disruption by modern technological encroachments — and the thoughtful context created by the programming as a whole: “an unhackneyed exercise in using music as a force for expansive expression.”
Appropriately, Gershon launched his era by spotlighting the aweinspiring artistry and virtuosity of the Chorale’s singers in the a cappella masterpiece Spem in alium (“Hope in Any Other”) by the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). Dating from late in Tallis’s long career, which stretched across one of the most dangerous periods in English history, this motet is a monument of Renaissance polyphony which sets a responsorial prayer for the Liturgy of the Hours (for Matins) as a staggering vocal web for eight choirs divided into five parts each.
The thrilling, tapestry-like effect created by this layering of parts exalts the new complexity of the High Renaissance — and the reach of the creative human spirit. Through its architecture, Tallis’s sonic weave also intensifies our sense of music’s spatial dimension — a quality which is brought out to particular advantage by the acoustics of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
This venue became the Chorale’s new home starting in the fall of 2003, and the transition was immediately recognized as a watershed moment. “I’ll never forget the Chorale’s first rehearsal in the new Disney Concert Hall,” recalls Cheryll Desberg, who sang between 1988 and 2008. “While the rehearsal was in session, Grant invited each Chorale member to step offstage as we all sang and venture out into the empty hall and notice the ultrasensitive acoustics of the room and to listen to the majesty of our sound and dynamic range. He compared it to driving a Ferrari. The clarity was awesome.” The very first piece the Chorale rehearsed in its proud new quarters as they did a sonic test drive? Randall Thompson’s (1899-1984) Alleluia, one of the single-bestloved pieces of American choral music, which was commissioned in 1940 to open the new Berskshire Music Center at Tanglewood.
Gershon, a native of Southern California who grew up in Alhambra and studied both piano and voice, had actually first joined forces with the Chorale as a young musician in another capacity: he played harpsichord in a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass in 1986 led by John Currie. But his understanding of LAMC’s unique values clearly reaches back to its early years under Roger Wagner. In addition to the big cornerstones of the repertory that were the raison d’être for founding the Chorale, as far as Wagner was concerned — and think of the memorable performances you’ve experienced here, over the past decade, of Monteverdi’s Vespers, of the Bach Passions and Messiah, of the Requiems of Mozart and Brahms, or the remarkable series of Haydn Masses — Gershon has pursued Wagner’s advocacy of more-accessible vernacular idioms of choral singing and of folk traditions.
Arguably the single most-definitive trait of the Grant Gershon era to date has been the graceful and persuasive balance he has managed to achieve against a backdrop of cultural change which is in a perpetual state of accelerando: a balance between tradition and innovation, between acknowledging the Chorale’s legacy and reimagining the role of the choral art for the 21st century and its new demands.
Thus we find a refreshing and cutting-edge alertness to the global wealth of choral music beyond its well-cultivated European and North American spheres. ME-NA-RI is a souvenir from the ear-opening Stories from Korea program in March 2011. This piece, by the Seoul-based composer Hyowon Woo (born in 1974), draws on the nationally iconic folk air Arirang (which is associated with the allegorical image of a lovesick girl who hopefully awaits her beloved’s return). With Korean percussion accompaniment, Woo’s treatment of the traditional melody using three choirs adapts the modern technique of “spatial music” and alludes to the natural echo-effect of the mountain landscape so closely associated with the text.
Turning our attention back to our own country, The Good Old Way gives a snapshot of the American experience as it has been passed on in the bold and vigorous populist tradition of shape note singing and The Sacred Harp. Prompted by a democratic impulse to expand musical literacy and sight-reading capacity, the shape note system of symbols took root in the rural South and was codified in the much-revised, much-added-to anthology of hymn tunes and the like which became known as The Sacred Harp.
Gershon points out that the fusion of technical expertise and heartfelt expression which is required to perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873-1943) All-Night Vigil of 1915 (also known as the Vespers) “showcases the brilliance of the Chorale’s voices.” “Rejoice, O Virgin” is the sixth of its fifteen movements and comes from the end of the Vespers section proper; the text is the Russian Orthodox equivalent of the Western Ave Maria/Hail Mary. In the Vigil Rachmaninoff refashions the traditional chant with touches of his own style, drawing on his natural gifts as an orchestrator to enhance the color and texture of his treatment of this “orchestra” of voices.
Another unforgettable Gershon program was the tribute to Duke Ellington (1899-1974) in May 2011. Ellington fashioned his affecting setting of The Lord’s Prayer for the third of his late-period, “beyond category” Sacred Concerts (subtitled “The Majesty of God” and premiered at Westminster Abbey in London on October 24, 1973). Ellington was suffering from the cancer that would kill him eventually when he wrote the music for the Third Sacred Concert, which may account for its markedly introspective tone. For Ellington, this was musical expression as a “form of worship” that resisted being fixed or fossilized.
With Dame albriçia mano Anton (“Be joyful, brother Anton”), Gershon orients us toward the heritage of Latin American choral music and its early years during colonization by Europeans. While the historical record is not certain, Gaspar Fernandes (1566- 1629) is believed to have emigrated from Portugal to the New World, where he held positions as organist and music director in cathedrals in present-day Guatemala and Mexico. He is significant for his compilations of liturgical music by Spanish composers of the time, to which he contributed some sacred music of his own. But Fernandes also turned his gaze to the local musical scene in a series of villancicos (popular songs using the vernacular, which later became associated predominantly with Christmas carols). In place of the dense formal textures of contemporary counterpoint, his song Dame Albriçia matches the downto-earth imagery of the text with vibrant, dancing rhythms (including percussion accompaniment) and a straightforward narrative structure parceled out among soloists and men’s and women’s choirs.
Concluding Grant Gershon’s set is Unclouded Day, a gospel favorite penned by the itinerant preacher Josiah Kelly Atwood (1828-1909) and wonderfully reimagined by Shawn Kirchner (born in 1970 and raised in Cedar Falls, Iowa) as one of his “bluegrass triptych” of choral arrangements of American gospel hymns collectively titled Heavenly Home. Kirchner explains that he added “Dolly Parton harmonies” for the women into the mix, along with a “bluegrass fugue” for the third verse.
As with the premiere of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, the enthusiastic audience response confirmed that Kirchner had a hit on his hands when the Chorale introduced Heavenly Home in May 2010, and this extraordinarily talented composer (a longtime LAMC tenor) is now serving a term as the Swan Family Composer in Residence.
It’s an especially fitting and inspiring note on which to end this set: Gershon has been deeply committed to LAMC’s legacy of adding to the choral music repertoire by engaging with living composers, and this 50th season will be capped with a program in June 2014 devoted entirely to new music, with four newly commissioned works (compositions by Kirchner, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Lang, and Francisco Núñez) and the music of Gabriela Lena Frank. As an internationally leading professional chorus in the 21st century, Gershon says, “the Chorale is poised to continue and to expand its advocacy of this great art form here and beyond Los Angeles and to be a leader by example for organizations around the world.”
| Title | Composers/Arranger | Guest Artists |
|---|---|---|
| Ave Maria | Tomás Luis de Victoria | |
| Il est bel et bon | Pierre Passereau | |
| Kyrie - Sally Gardens from Missa Carminum Brevis | Paul Chihara | |
| I Dream of Jeanie | Stephen Collins Foster | Steve Pence, Bass/Baritone |
| Western Songs | arr. Roger Wagner | Abdiel Gonzalez, BaritoneLesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| Ev'ry time I feel the spirit | arr. William Dawson | |
| Danny Boy | arr. Roger Wagner | |
| Ave verum corpus, K. 618 | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | |
| My Love's in Germany | Mack Wilberg | Shawn Kirchner, TenorLisa Edwards, Piano |
| I'll Ay Call in by Yon Town | Mack Wilberg | Shawn Kirchner, TenorLisa Edwards, Piano |
| Veni Creator Spiritus | Gregorian Chant | |
| Tu es Petrus | Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina | |
| Tu es Petrus | Maurice Duruflé | Lesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| Ubi caritas | Maurice Duruflé | Lesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| O Magnum Mysterium | Morten Lauridsen | |
| Hold On! | Jester Hairston | |
| The Lord Bless You and Keep You | John Rutter | |
| Spem in alium | Thomas Tallis | |
| ME-NA-RI | Hyowon Woo | Sunjoo Yeo, SopranoTheresa Dimond, Principal PercussionTimm Boatman, Percussion |
| The Good Old Way | William Walker | |
| Rejoice, O Virgin from All-Night Vigil | Sergei Rachmaninoff | |
| The Lord's Prayer | Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington | |
| Dame albriçia mano Anton | Gaspar Fernandes | Ayana Haviv, SopranoAlice Kirwan Murray, AltoAlex Acuña, Percussion |
| Unclouded Day | Shawn Kirchner | |
| Alleluia | Randall Thompson |
Archival Recording
| Date | Review | Media | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 23, 2013 |
Maestro Grant Gershon turned around and said, simply, "Wow!" as he prepared to conduct a stage and side aisles filled with current and former members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the grand finale work of a three-hour, emotionally-charged program jam-packed with mor... Read More Maestro Grant Gershon turned around and said, simply, "Wow!" as he prepared to conduct a stage and side aisles filled with current and former members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the grand finale work of a three-hour, emotionally-charged program jam-packed with morsels of musical meals served up by the Chorale's four Music Directors over the previous 49 seasons. As outlined below, each selection could not have been better served by the 110 current (and in the finale, dozens of former) members. |
LA Opus | Douglas Neslund |
| Sep 24, 2013 |
The Los Angeles Master Chorale begins its 50th season with a very varied program of sensational singing at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Los Angeles Master Chorale begins its 50th season with a very varied program of sensational singing at Walt Disney Concert Hall. |
Los Angeles Times | Mark Swed |
| Sep 24, 2013 |
The gala concert of the Los Angeles Master Chorale's 50th season given this past Sunday, Sept 22, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was a gorgeous tapestry of vocal and musical forms presented to a sold-out audience. The gala concert of the Los Angeles Master Chorale's 50th season given this past Sunday, Sept 22, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was a gorgeous tapestry of vocal and musical forms presented to a sold-out audience. |
Examiner.com | Ahdda Shur |
| Sep 25, 2013 |
Tomás Luis da Vittoria: Ave Maria Tomás Luis da Vittoria: Ave Maria |
ConcertoNet.com | Matthew Richard Martinez |
| Sep 25, 2013 |
It's the season for round numbers here in Los Angeles. The one you surely know about is the 10th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall the LA Philharmonic has been promoting. But there's a more important big anniversary downtown. That one is a 50th and it's the... Read More It's the season for round numbers here in Los Angeles. The one you surely know about is the 10th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall the LA Philharmonic has been promoting. But there's a more important big anniversary downtown. That one is a 50th and it's the number of seasons now being celebrated by the Los Angeles Master Chorale now under Music Director Grant Gershon. On Sunday the chorale kicked off their big season with a mega show. A nostalgic look back on the first fifty years of the ensemble through the musical eyes of its four former and current music directors. A hodge-podge of pieces by dozens of composers was presented to provide an overview of the musical interests and temperments that have helped shape the group's repertory. And while it may not have always been the most cohesive performance musically with such a scope, the show did provide a great sense of the LAMC's history and direction and had a lot to say about where the group is right now. |
Out West Arts | Brian Holt |
| Sep 29, 2013 |
Of all the resident companies at The Music Center, the Los Angeles Master Chorale is the one that truly sets LA apart from other big metros. Orchestras, opera and theatre companies, even ballets are a dime a dozen in other performing arts centers, but no one else can claim an inde... Read More Of all the resident companies at The Music Center, the Los Angeles Master Chorale is the one that truly sets LA apart from other big metros. Orchestras, opera and theatre companies, even ballets are a dime a dozen in other performing arts centers, but no one else can claim an independent choir of such high quality, long history, and — most importantly — relevance to the community and the art form.
Los Angeles Master Chorale: September 22, 2013; Walt Disney Concert Hall |
All is Yar | CK Dexter Haven |
| Oct 5, 2013 |
WORDS FAIL TO EXPRESS THE TRIUMPH WORDS FAIL TO EXPRESS THE TRIUMPH |
Stage and Cinema | Tony Frankel |
The Indispensable Art of Choral Music: Celebrating the Los Angeles Master Chorale
by Thomas May “When people wish to express their innermost thoughts and dreams, they sing — and when they sing together, it is called choral music,” writes Nick Strimple at the end of his acclaimed history of this art form in the twentieth century. Despite all the competing sources of musical pleasure that abound in our post-postmodern era, choral music “continues as an indispensable ingredient in Earth’s cultural fabric.” During the course of a half century’s worth of making music, the Los Angeles Master Chorale has brought people together to give a shared human voice to these thoughts and dreams — for singers and audiences alike — and has made itself indispensable in the process. A tally over those years of 527 performances and 88 premieres (57 of them world premieres) represents an extraordinary record of indispensability: to the cultural life of its home city, to the preservation of choral music’s rich legacy and to innovation of the art by promoting significant contemporary composers and discovering hidden musical gems. Tonight we look back on these achievements and celebrate the phases and facets that have shaped the Chorale’s identity. The program is divided into four sets, each highlighting the respective personalities of the ensemble’s four music directors. Above all, though, the tremendous range of styles, techniques and varieties of musical meaning on offer this evening is a tribute to the versatile — and indispensable — artistry of these singers. A Chorale Is Born The idea that gave birth to the Chorale became a concrete reality with the inaugural concert of January 27, 1965, which featured Bach’s B minor Mass. This coincided with the establishment of the Los Angeles Music Center in the early 1960s. But it actually all began nearly thirty years before that, when a visionary young conductor named Roger Wagner (1914-1992), freshly appointed as Music Director of LA’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, launched his first fledgling choir and, with it, a career devoted to choral conducting that would leave a deep and lasting impression on the history of choral music. Within less than a decade, in 1946, he had organized the Los Angeles Concert Youth Chorus, from which emerged the Roger Wagner Chorale. Through widespread touring and media presence (radio and television broadcasts as well as many recordings, winning a Grammy with the album Virtuoso! in 1958), the Roger Wagner Chorale gained international recognition. Locally it became an integral part of the city’s musical life by performing regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Wagner laid the organizational groundwork for LAMC by incorporating the Southern California Choral Music Association in 1962, using the Hollywood Bowl Association and The Southern California Symphony Association as models; Z. Wayne Griffin was elected President. In 1993 Donald J. Nores, now an emeritus member of the LAMC Board of Directors, headed an historical committee to dig into the facts regarding this foundational period. He observes that Wagner’s guiding idea had been “to form an organization to promote choral music and to establish a chorale which would perform the great choral masterworks to the highest musical standards in a season of its own.” This project suddenly gained momentum when Wayne Griffin forged a bridge between Wagner and members of the LA Junior Chamber of Commerce. They approached Dorothy Chandler as the first phase of the new Music Center was nearing completion in 1964, and she encouraged their proposal of a choral institution that would enjoy the status of a resident company of the Music Center alongside the Philharmonic. (These would be joined by the Center Theatre Group in 1967 and, in 1986, by Los Angeles Opera, while the erstwhile Civic Light Opera ceased operation in 1987.) In an interview with Don Richardson for radio station KCRW’s “Behind the Scenes” journal, Wagner himself recalled that, as part of the new Music Center, he wanted to found an organization “that could be compared vocally with the LA Philharmonic in both its presentation and its goals.” From the start, then, thanks to this fortuitous convergence of goals, LAMC was a rare animal. None of the other major cultural centers from this era — notably the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center — assigned a comparably prominent role to choral music. By founding an independent professional choral company to collaborate with the Philharmonic while at the same time offering a season of its own, Wagner in effect created an entirely “new genre,” as Vance George terms it in his chapter on choral conducting in The Cambridge Companion to Conducting. An avid enthusiast of singing in liturgical Latin, Wagner briefly considered “Schola Cantorum” as the ensemble’s name before everyone agreed on the less-forbidding “Los Angeles Master Chorale.” Nores reports that the organization started out with a modest office in the Chamber Building on Bixel Street consisting of a single desk, filing cabinet and a rented typewriter. Brochures for the inaugural season announced a subscription price in the Orchestra and Founders sections of $25 (no, that’s not a typo). Incidentally, the Chorale now celebrates its 50th season, but that first one began in January rather than the fall (and ended in April). If you try to reckon the anniversary purely by arithmetic, you’ll get caught up in a situation similar to the one you’ll recall from around the millennium, when we were fretting over when the last century technically ended and the present one began. The Roger Wagner Era: 1964-1986 Could there be a more appropriate way to kick off tonight’s program than with the Ave Maria of Tomás Luis da Vittoria (c. 1548-1611)? This two-part motet, a setting of the beautiful prayer to the Virgin by the great Spanish composer of Renaissance sacred music, was one of Wagner’s well-known signatures as a conductor. Ron Long, who sang with the Chorale under his tenure, points out that “Roger had begun more than 2,500 Roger Wagner Chorale concerts with the Gregorian setting, after which he merged immediately” into Vittoria’s motet. He recalls one Monday rehearsal when a French conductor stopped in to visit and heard them sing the Ave Maria. “We all knew it by memory. When we finished and everyone was walking out…I overheard him say, ‘Yes, but how does he get that sound?’” One of its sources, according to Wagner himself, was his long exposure to the Catholic Church’s sacred music tradition. “My ideal of sound,” he remarked in his interview on KCRW, is closely connected to the “purity of sound in church choirs and in Renaissance music.” Clarity and a homogeneous blend — in place of a distractingly “excessive vibrato” — feature prominently. When discussing his process for auditioning singers, Wagner said he always looked for a special kind of voice capable of fitting into a group and would turn down someone like Maria Callas or Franco Corelli, because their distinctive style of singing would stick out. Music Director Grant Gershon describes the hallmark Roger Wagner sound as “an extremely balanced, resonant, full-bodied choral sound that’s very sensuous and rich in quality.” As to its subtlety, William Lyon Lee, who sang in the early years, recalls that “Roger was one of very few musicians attuned to not only the notes sung but the overtones usually only heard by the best musicians.” Wagner’s background naturally shaped his conception of an ideal choral sound. A nod to his French roots is heard in Il est bel et bon by Pierre Passereau (fl. 1509-1547). Its patter rhythms and witty, playfully virtuoso musical onomatopoeia make this a delightful example of the secular Parisian chanson. Written by a priest and cathedral singer who makes an appearance in the pages of Rabelais, the piece became immensely popular and appears in several editions throughout the sixteenth century. Born in Le Puy, France, in the fateful year of 1914 (his centenary will fall on January 16), Wagner first studied music with his father, the cathedral organist in Dijon. A different but related trait — Wagner’s penchant for theatricality — must have been encouraged by countless hours listening and fantasizing while his father accompanied silent movies at the Happy Hour Theater in Syracuse, New York. Wagner moved with his family to the U.S. while he was still a boy and followed along his father’s path by commencing his career as a church organist. After graduate study in France and in Montreal (where he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the pivotal Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez), Wagner made the leap from playing organ to choral conducting. Paul Salamunovich points out that Wagner earned his first position as music director at St. Joseph’s “because of his talents as an accomplished organist and not because of his choral ability” — in fact, up until then he had acquired “no formal training or experience in this area. But within a few short months, spurred on by a special ambition, confidence and drive, this self-taught ‘by trial-and-error’ conductor” formed his first choir. The Chorale’s inaugural season reflected Wagner’s devotion to presenting masterpieces of the choral tradition — Bach’s B minor Mass and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven (with Robert Shaw as guest conductor) — along with his love of early music. In March came a “Festival of 16th- and 17th-Century Music.” Gershon remarks that his predecessor had “a passionate feeling for early music” and was among the first to champion rediscovery of the neglected treasury of Renaissance music — including a revival of the Monteverdi Vespers. While he was in some ways identifiably “a musician of his time and era, Roger could also be seen as forwardthinking in his programming. The Chorale did a lot of new music during his era.” The representative example of the latter that we hear is “Kyrie/Sally Gardens” from the Missa Carminum Brevis (an abridged version of the original Missa Carminum) of American composer Paul Chihara (born in 1938). Specially commissioned for the Chorale’s American Bicentennial program in January 1976 (which included guest appearances by Aaron Copland to conduct and Jimmy Stewart as narrator), this music was conceived as part of a “folk-song Mass” uniting popular idioms with liturgical tradition. Chihara, who dedicated the Missa to Roger Wagner and the Chorale, wrote of his desire to identify “sacred with profane love” in “a transformation which heightens religious devotion.” He chose a different folk song to serve as cantus firmus for each movement (hence “Sally Gardens”), combining these with Gregorian incipits and the choral style and texture of Palestrina’s Masses as a model. Filling out LAMC’s first season were the Texas Boys’ Choir in a guest concert of classical and folk pieces and a concert presentation of Rossini’s opera Moses in its first-ever West Coast performance. Already several branches of the Chorale’s activity in years to come are in evidence: the interest in vernacular and popular choral traditions and the urge to rescue forgotten or undervalued scores for new generations of music lovers. Gershon observes that it proved especially challenging to whittle down the selections for this opening set in a way that gives a reasonable portrait of the Wagner years, since “his tastes were remarkably eclectic, and he was associated with so many styles and trends.” One of these is Wagner’s gift for making effective choral arrangements of folk music and more popular genres, as we hear in his treatments of the Stephen Foster standard I Dream of Jeanie, the potpourri of cowboy tunes in Western Songs and Danny Boy, the seemingly timeless ballad to the Irish “Londonderry Air” with words by English lyricist Frederic Weatherly. Wagner enjoyed close ties with Capitol Records and was commissioned to put together complementary albums called Songs of the Old World and Songs of the New World. Nick Strimple emphasizes that his widely circulated arrangements of folk songs and spirituals had a huge impact on choral groups in high schools and colleges. Wagner also understood the significance of his colleague William Levi Dawson’s (1899- 1990) contributions in preparing high-quality, authentic editions of spirituals (which we sample in his rousing arrangement of Ev’ry time I feel the spirit). Already by 1967 LAMC was an ensemble to be reckoned with. Reviewing the Yule Concert in 1967, the critic Martin Bernheimer — not exactly known as a pushover — declared that “everyone should know by now that Wagner’s 100-odd singers, when on form, represent a vocal organization with few peers.” Finding them “decidedly on form” in this performance, Bernheimer praised the ensemble’s “richness of tone, counterbalanced by astonishing flexibility of texture and dynamics.” The John Currie Era: 1986-1991 Wagner remained Music Director laureate until his death in 1992 — surviving an alarming hemorrhage which occurred while he was conducting a live performance of music from Gounod’s Faust in February 1987. But after the Chorale’s first two decades, he yielded the reins to John Currie, a native of Prestwick, Scotland. The 51-year-old Currie had led the Scottish National Orchestra Chorus and Edinburgh Festival Chorus, bringing a background that favored using the Chorale in large-scale choral-symphonic compositions like Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and the canonical Requiem settings. Even the programs devoted to Scottish folk music that became one of his hallmarks tended to be outsize extravaganzas featuring hefty orchestral accompaniments, with all the bells and whistles (and bagpipes and drums). Inevitably, almost every great institution undergoes a period of turbulent transition as it reconsiders and moves away from the identity established by its founder. This is part of the natural life cycle of cultural organizations as much as of individuals. Supporters of Wagner’s ideals became pitted against those aligned with Currie’s new vision. The sense of controversy emerges clearly enough from the critics’ paper trail. One camp claimed that Currie had “dismantled the Wagner sound into an amorphous, less well-defined blend.” But not all the critics agreed. In his LA Times review of Currie’s farewell concert in 1991 (at the end of his fifth season), Daniel Cariaga marveled at the mastery of his performance of Mozart’s Requiem: “Every part of this sometimes disjunct work seemed to connect to every other part. The totality moved forward, from the stoic beginning to the transcendent close, in an apprehendable linearity.” As entrée into the Requiem, the program included Mozart’s motet setting of the Ave verum corpus (in D major to the Requiem’s D minor and also a product of his miraculous final year in 1791, the 200th anniversary of which was being commemorated). The profoundly affecting, pared-down essence Mozart captures in this music would prove moving indeed when Grant Gershon programmed the same work on his inaugural program in memory of the victims of the recent terrorist attack of 9/11. Along with Mozart, the folk music of his native Scotland was another Currie specialty. In this he not only continued the thread of folk-related exploration already started by Wagner but pointed ahead to trends that the Chorale has continued to evolve in the years since. We hear two examples of this repertory: Mack Wilberg’s settings of the traditional My Love’s in Germany and I’ll Ay Call in by Yon Town. When Currie presided over an entire program of Scottish folk arrangements as part of his first season, Cariaga found that “these tunes filled an evening with joyous or melancholy feelings skillfully projected by 62 singers of the chorale, vigorously led by Currie,” who also supplied “brief but pointed spoken introductions.” Another critic, Richard S. Ginnell, compared the popularity of this fare to that of the Messiah sing-alongs instituted under Wagner. (Currie even sported a tartan when he reappeared after intermission.) The Scotsman’s classical training, according to Ginnell, in fact enhances what are sophisticated arrangements. He cites a couple of Currie-fied songs that allow listeners to “latch onto the tunes…and still savor the busy strands of winds circulating in and out of the texture.” The Paul Salamunovich Era: 1991-2001 In the spring of 1939, native Angeleno Paul Salamunovich — the Chorale’s Music Director Emeritus — had an opportunity to listen to Roger Wagner and his first choir of men and boys, which had debuted only a year before. The setting was a small Catholic parish church in Redondo Beach, and, as Salamunovich recalls, he never forgot the beautiful impression their singing of Gregorian chant made on his 11-year-old ears. It was his first encounter with “the overwhelming charisma and strength of the conductor,” he writes, adding that he “reveled in the sheer beauty of the singing.” Within a few years, after his family had moved to Hollywood, Salamunovich himself began singing in the choir of Blessed Sacrament Church, where the director was Richard Keys Biggs, Wagner’s own former organ teacher. Salamunovich was eventually able to sing directly under Wagner, becoming one of “those lucky choir boys” whose rendition of Gregorian chant had so impressed him. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy right out of high school, he returned to Los Angeles and joined Wagner’s newly established Concert Youth Chorus, which became the Roger Wagner Chorale. Salamunovich sang with the ensemble on the soundtrack recorded for Joan of Arc, the 1948 Victor Fleming film starring Ingrid Bergman, which marked the Roger Wagner Chorale’s first professional engagement. Their partnership with the LA Philharmonic began soon thereafter, and their activities quickly expanded as the singers took on more recording projects (a celebrated account of Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass for the Capitol Records label in 1951) and even international tours, including an invitation to participate in the festival for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. For a concert LAMC gave in 1999 celebrating its history and the legacy of its founder, Salamunovich wrote a heartfelt tribute to this life-changing mentor: “Because of his great talent and productivity, Roger Wagner can be given a great deal of credit for what I believe to have been the ‘Golden Age of Choral Music’ [in] the 40s, 50s, and 60s—and he has been acknowledged as one of the giants in this field.” He further emphasized what he had absorbed from Wagner: “May I be so bold as to say I reflect the training personally received from his gifts.” The widely traveled Salamunovich meanwhile developed a formidable reputation of his own as director for six decades of the St. Charles Borromeo Choir in North Hollywood. His St. Charles Choir sang at the Vatican, appeared on various popular television programs, and — most famously of all — recorded the unforgettable Sherman brothers’ tune “It’s a Small World” for Disneyland Park. Salamunovich has meanwhile left his stamp on generations of musicians through his influential career as a music professor and director of choral activities at Loyola Marymount University, where he remains Professor Emeritus of Music, as well as through his other academic positions and the choral workshops he has led around the world. And of course Salamunovich has exerted a formative influence on the sound and artistry of the Chorale, serving in varying capacities since the group was established. After singing as one of the original members, Salamunovich contributed as assistant conductor to Wagner between 1953 and 1977 — a task which entailed preparing the Chorale for some of its most legendary performances with the Philharmonic. “I’m sort of like the prodigal son, come back,” said Salamunovich in the Music Center press conference announcing his return to the Chorale as its new Music Director in 1991. Writing about the changing of the guard in the LA Times, John Henken reported that the conductor was “very much aware that he returns to the Master Chorale at a difficult time for the organization and for choral music generally in this country.” As a remedy, Salamunovich essentially returned to the founding values of Roger Wagner — and to the musical ideals on which the Chorale had built its identity. Grant Gershon points out that, with regard to the Chorale’s early music repertoire, this meant a greater focus on chant and more attention to the antecedents of the great Renaissance flourishing of choral music. We therefore begin this set with the chant setting of the early medieval Catholic hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus (traditionally attributed to a ninth-century archbishop but likely dating earlier). Closely associated with the Christian feast of Pentecost — celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles 50 days after the Easter Resurrection — Veni, Creator Spiritus is also a fitting ode to the creative spirit, as Gustav Mahler well knew when he chose to set this text as the cantata-like first movement of his Eighth Symphony. Salamunovich moreover enhanced his practical performance skills with an immense scholarly understanding of church music. Covering an a cappella program in March 1993, the critic Donna Perlmutter admired his connoisseur-like ability to trace out connections and parallels between early music and the choral literature of later centuries: “By its end, few could doubt his belief that the human voice is the most perfect and versatile of instruments.” That program had opened with Palestrina’s (c. 1525-1594) splendidly ceremonial six-part motet on Tu es Petrus (1572), the New Testament text about Peter as “the rock” on which the church would be founded. The composer’s recent appointment as music director of St. Peter’s in Rome adds another dimension to the exuberance of his setting. The pairing of Palestrina and Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) meanwhile represents a lovely example of the sorts of historical interconnections Salamunovich so persuasively draws. The modern French composer’s catalogue of choral works is small but endures at the center of the repertoire. One of these, Four Motets (1960), draws on Gregorian chant to transcend the span of centuries up to Duruflé’s own. We hear two of these: Tu es Petrus and the lucidly shaped Ubi caritas, to a text associated with the liturgy of Holy Thursday on the eve of Good Friday. A modern setting of a timeless text occasioned what can plausibly be claimed as the single most memorable moment in the Salamunovich era. It was part of the “Home for the Holidays” program of December 18, 1994. In her memoir of life as a choir singer, Imperfect Harmony, Stacy Horn sets the scene of the premiere of O Magnum Mysterium in the setting by Morten Lauridsen (born in 1943): “Salamunovich turned around and… spoke directly to the audience. If anyone had asked him who his favorite composer was, he told them, he would have said Tomás Luis da Vittoria. Vittoria’s O Magnum Mysterium remains as fresh as the day it was written. ‘Tonight, you’re about to hear the world premiere of the twentieth-century counterpart.’” Horn adds that within three years, this popular breakthrough for Lauridsen would become the highest-selling item in the catalogue of his publisher Peermusic’s distributor, Theodore Presser, ever since the company had been founded in 1783. Lauridsen, who would soon begin his term as LAMC Composer in Residence (which he served from 1995 to 2001), wrote O Magnum Mysterium on a commission from then-Board Chair Marshall Rutter, a co-founder of the Chorale who had been elected to the very first Board back in 1964. Rutter’s request was intended as a Christmas present for his wife, Terry Knowles, LAMC’s current President. The original Latin text that has moved so many composers over the centuries conveys, within the space of a mere 23 words, the central paradox around which the Christmas miracle pivots: the manifestation of the divine takes place not among the elite but is the privilege of the most humble to witness and cherish. Lauridsen translates this sense of unfathomable wonder into music of profound serenity in his radiant, perfectly proportioned setting for the unadorned human voice. Try topping that for a holiday gift! The spiritual Hold On! embodies yet another kind of timelessness — we hear the expert arrangement by Jester Hairston (1901-2000) — while the anthem setting The Lord Bless You and Keep You (1981) by John Rutter (born in London in 1945) became a beloved signature encore piece of the Chorale under Salamunovich’s tenure. The Grant Gershon Era: 2001-present “This will be an ensemble to watch.” So wrote the LA Times’ current music critic, Mark Swed, in his enthusiastic report on LAMC’s first concert under the fourth music director in its history. In spite of the terrible shadow of 9/11 which loomed over that fall in 2001, a sense of change and renewal was circulating amid the American cultural landscape at the turn of the millennium. Swed remarked on the difference made by Kent Nagano in his first venture as principal conductor at LA Opera — he had just inaugurated his term with a new Lohengrin directed by the actor Maximilian Schell — and pointed to other new assignments around the country (Robert Spano in Atlanta, Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony). “But none has gone so far as Grant Gershon in putting into practice a radical new vision,” Swed concluded on the basis of that Saturday night program on September 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He drew attention to Gershon’s commitment to living composers — the concert closed with Philip Glass’s Itaipú, a big piece for chorus and orchestra juxtaposing a creation myth passed down by the Guarani Indians with their disruption by modern technological encroachments — and the thoughtful context created by the programming as a whole: “an unhackneyed exercise in using music as a force for expansive expression.” Appropriately, Gershon launched his era by spotlighting the aweinspiring artistry and virtuosity of the Chorale’s singers in the a cappella masterpiece Spem in alium (“Hope in Any Other”) by the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). Dating from late in Tallis’s long career, which stretched across one of the most dangerous periods in English history, this motet is a monument of Renaissance polyphony which sets a responsorial prayer for the Liturgy of the Hours (for Matins) as a staggering vocal web for eight choirs divided into five parts each. The thrilling, tapestry-like effect created by this layering of parts exalts the new complexity of the High Renaissance — and the reach of the creative human spirit. Through its architecture, Tallis’s sonic weave also intensifies our sense of music’s spatial dimension — a quality which is brought out to particular advantage by the acoustics of Walt Disney Concert Hall. This venue became the Chorale’s new home starting in the fall of 2003, and the transition was immediately recognized as a watershed moment. “I’ll never forget the Chorale’s first rehearsal in the new Disney Concert Hall,” recalls Cheryll Desberg, who sang between 1988 and 2008. “While the rehearsal was in session, Grant invited each Chorale member to step offstage as we all sang and venture out into the empty hall and notice the ultrasensitive acoustics of the room and to listen to the majesty of our sound and dynamic range. He compared it to driving a Ferrari. The clarity was awesome.” The very first piece the Chorale rehearsed in its proud new quarters as they did a sonic test drive? Randall Thompson’s (1899-1984) Alleluia, one of the single-bestloved pieces of American choral music, which was commissioned in 1940 to open the new Berskshire Music Center at Tanglewood. Gershon, a native of Southern California who grew up in Alhambra and studied both piano and voice, had actually first joined forces with the Chorale as a young musician in another capacity: he played harpsichord in a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass in 1986 led by John Currie. But his understanding of LAMC’s unique values clearly reaches back to its early years under Roger Wagner. In addition to the big cornerstones of the repertory that were the raison d’être for founding the Chorale, as far as Wagner was concerned — and think of the memorable performances you’ve experienced here, over the past decade, of Monteverdi’s Vespers, of the Bach Passions and Messiah, of the Requiems of Mozart and Brahms, or the remarkable series of Haydn Masses — Gershon has pursued Wagner’s advocacy of more-accessible vernacular idioms of choral singing and of folk traditions. Arguably the single most-definitive trait of the Grant Gershon era to date has been the graceful and persuasive balance he has managed to achieve against a backdrop of cultural change which is in a perpetual state of accelerando: a balance between tradition and innovation, between acknowledging the Chorale’s legacy and reimagining the role of the choral art for the 21st century and its new demands. Thus we find a refreshing and cutting-edge alertness to the global wealth of choral music beyond its well-cultivated European and North American spheres. ME-NA-RI is a souvenir from the ear-opening Stories from Korea program in March 2011. This piece, by the Seoul-based composer Hyowon Woo (born in 1974), draws on the nationally iconic folk air Arirang (which is associated with the allegorical image of a lovesick girl who hopefully awaits her beloved’s return). With Korean percussion accompaniment, Woo’s treatment of the traditional melody using three choirs adapts the modern technique of “spatial music” and alludes to the natural echo-effect of the mountain landscape so closely associated with the text. Turning our attention back to our own country, The Good Old Way gives a snapshot of the American experience as it has been passed on in the bold and vigorous populist tradition of shape note singing and The Sacred Harp. Prompted by a democratic impulse to expand musical literacy and sight-reading capacity, the shape note system of symbols took root in the rural South and was codified in the much-revised, much-added-to anthology of hymn tunes and the like which became known as The Sacred Harp. Gershon points out that the fusion of technical expertise and heartfelt expression which is required to perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873-1943) All-Night Vigil of 1915 (also known as the Vespers) “showcases the brilliance of the Chorale’s voices.” “Rejoice, O Virgin” is the sixth of its fifteen movements and comes from the end of the Vespers section proper; the text is the Russian Orthodox equivalent of the Western Ave Maria/Hail Mary. In the Vigil Rachmaninoff refashions the traditional chant with touches of his own style, drawing on his natural gifts as an orchestrator to enhance the color and texture of his treatment of this “orchestra” of voices. Another unforgettable Gershon program was the tribute to Duke Ellington (1899-1974) in May 2011. Ellington fashioned his affecting setting of The Lord’s Prayer for the third of his late-period, “beyond category” Sacred Concerts (subtitled “The Majesty of God” and premiered at Westminster Abbey in London on October 24, 1973). Ellington was suffering from the cancer that would kill him eventually when he wrote the music for the Third Sacred Concert, which may account for its markedly introspective tone. For Ellington, this was musical expression as a “form of worship” that resisted being fixed or fossilized. With Dame albriçia mano Anton (“Be joyful, brother Anton”), Gershon orients us toward the heritage of Latin American choral music and its early years during colonization by Europeans. While the historical record is not certain, Gaspar Fernandes (1566- 1629) is believed to have emigrated from Portugal to the New World, where he held positions as organist and music director in cathedrals in present-day Guatemala and Mexico. He is significant for his compilations of liturgical music by Spanish composers of the time, to which he contributed some sacred music of his own. But Fernandes also turned his gaze to the local musical scene in a series of villancicos (popular songs using the vernacular, which later became associated predominantly with Christmas carols). In place of the dense formal textures of contemporary counterpoint, his song Dame Albriçia matches the downto-earth imagery of the text with vibrant, dancing rhythms (including percussion accompaniment) and a straightforward narrative structure parceled out among soloists and men’s and women’s choirs. Concluding Grant Gershon’s set is Unclouded Day, a gospel favorite penned by the itinerant preacher Josiah Kelly Atwood (1828-1909) and wonderfully reimagined by Shawn Kirchner (born in 1970 and raised in Cedar Falls, Iowa) as one of his “bluegrass triptych” of choral arrangements of American gospel hymns collectively titled Heavenly Home. Kirchner explains that he added “Dolly Parton harmonies” for the women into the mix, along with a “bluegrass fugue” for the third verse. As with the premiere of Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, the enthusiastic audience response confirmed that Kirchner had a hit on his hands when the Chorale introduced Heavenly Home in May 2010, and this extraordinarily talented composer (a longtime LAMC tenor) is now serving a term as the Swan Family Composer in Residence. It’s an especially fitting and inspiring note on which to end this set: Gershon has been deeply committed to LAMC’s legacy of adding to the choral music repertoire by engaging with living composers, and this 50th season will be capped with a program in June 2014 devoted entirely to new music, with four newly commissioned works (compositions by Kirchner, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Lang, and Francisco Núñez) and the music of Gabriela Lena Frank. As an internationally leading professional chorus in the 21st century, Gershon says, “the Chorale is poised to continue and to expand its advocacy of this great art form here and beyond Los Angeles and to be a leader by example for organizations around the world.”| Title | Composers/Arranger | Guest Artists |
|---|---|---|
| Ave Maria | Tomás Luis de Victoria | |
| Il est bel et bon | Pierre Passereau | |
| Kyrie - Sally Gardens from Missa Carminum Brevis | Paul Chihara | |
| I Dream of Jeanie | Stephen Collins Foster | Steve Pence, Bass/Baritone |
| Western Songs | arr. Roger Wagner | Abdiel Gonzalez, BaritoneLesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| Ev'ry time I feel the spirit | arr. William Dawson | |
| Danny Boy | arr. Roger Wagner | |
| Ave verum corpus, K. 618 | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | |
| My Love's in Germany | Mack Wilberg | Shawn Kirchner, TenorLisa Edwards, Piano |
| I'll Ay Call in by Yon Town | Mack Wilberg | Shawn Kirchner, TenorLisa Edwards, Piano |
| Veni Creator Spiritus | Gregorian Chant | |
| Tu es Petrus | Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina | |
| Tu es Petrus | Maurice Duruflé | Lesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| Ubi caritas | Maurice Duruflé | Lesley Leighton, Conductor, Soprano |
| O Magnum Mysterium | Morten Lauridsen | |
| Hold On! | Jester Hairston | |
| The Lord Bless You and Keep You | John Rutter | |
| Spem in alium | Thomas Tallis | |
| ME-NA-RI | Hyowon Woo | Sunjoo Yeo, SopranoTheresa Dimond, Principal PercussionTimm Boatman, Percussion |
| The Good Old Way | William Walker | |
| Rejoice, O Virgin from All-Night Vigil | Sergei Rachmaninoff | |
| The Lord's Prayer | Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington | |
| Dame albriçia mano Anton | Gaspar Fernandes | Ayana Haviv, SopranoAlice Kirwan Murray, AltoAlex Acuña, Percussion |
| Unclouded Day | Shawn Kirchner | |
| Alleluia | Randall Thompson |
Archival Recording
| Date | Review | Media | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 23, 2013 |
Maestro Grant Gershon turned around and said, simply, "Wow!" as he prepared to conduct a stage and side aisles filled with current and former members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the grand finale work of a three-hour, emotionally-charged program jam-packed with mor... Read More Maestro Grant Gershon turned around and said, simply, "Wow!" as he prepared to conduct a stage and side aisles filled with current and former members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the grand finale work of a three-hour, emotionally-charged program jam-packed with morsels of musical meals served up by the Chorale's four Music Directors over the previous 49 seasons. As outlined below, each selection could not have been better served by the 110 current (and in the finale, dozens of former) members. |
LA Opus | Douglas Neslund |
| Sep 24, 2013 |
The Los Angeles Master Chorale begins its 50th season with a very varied program of sensational singing at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Los Angeles Master Chorale begins its 50th season with a very varied program of sensational singing at Walt Disney Concert Hall. |
Los Angeles Times | Mark Swed |
| Sep 24, 2013 |
The gala concert of the Los Angeles Master Chorale's 50th season given this past Sunday, Sept 22, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was a gorgeous tapestry of vocal and musical forms presented to a sold-out audience. The gala concert of the Los Angeles Master Chorale's 50th season given this past Sunday, Sept 22, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was a gorgeous tapestry of vocal and musical forms presented to a sold-out audience. |
Examiner.com | Ahdda Shur |
| Sep 25, 2013 |
Tomás Luis da Vittoria: Ave Maria Tomás Luis da Vittoria: Ave Maria |
ConcertoNet.com | Matthew Richard Martinez |
| Sep 25, 2013 |
It's the season for round numbers here in Los Angeles. The one you surely know about is the 10th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall the LA Philharmonic has been promoting. But there's a more important big anniversary downtown. That one is a 50th and it's the... Read More It's the season for round numbers here in Los Angeles. The one you surely know about is the 10th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall the LA Philharmonic has been promoting. But there's a more important big anniversary downtown. That one is a 50th and it's the number of seasons now being celebrated by the Los Angeles Master Chorale now under Music Director Grant Gershon. On Sunday the chorale kicked off their big season with a mega show. A nostalgic look back on the first fifty years of the ensemble through the musical eyes of its four former and current music directors. A hodge-podge of pieces by dozens of composers was presented to provide an overview of the musical interests and temperments that have helped shape the group's repertory. And while it may not have always been the most cohesive performance musically with such a scope, the show did provide a great sense of the LAMC's history and direction and had a lot to say about where the group is right now. |
Out West Arts | Brian Holt |
| Sep 29, 2013 |
Of all the resident companies at The Music Center, the Los Angeles Master Chorale is the one that truly sets LA apart from other big metros. Orchestras, opera and theatre companies, even ballets are a dime a dozen in other performing arts centers, but no one else can claim an inde... Read More Of all the resident companies at The Music Center, the Los Angeles Master Chorale is the one that truly sets LA apart from other big metros. Orchestras, opera and theatre companies, even ballets are a dime a dozen in other performing arts centers, but no one else can claim an independent choir of such high quality, long history, and — most importantly — relevance to the community and the art form.
Los Angeles Master Chorale: September 22, 2013; Walt Disney Concert Hall |
All is Yar | CK Dexter Haven |
| Oct 5, 2013 |
WORDS FAIL TO EXPRESS THE TRIUMPH WORDS FAIL TO EXPRESS THE TRIUMPH |
Stage and Cinema | Tony Frankel |
