HALL CONDUCTS : CHORALE PITS MOZART VS. SALIERI

No. Contrary to Technicolored legend, Antonio Salieri was not a jealous, psychotic hack who killed an obnoxious baby genius named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Peter Shaffer be damned.

Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, William Hall and the Los Angeles Master Chorale pleaded Salieri’s neglected and unpopular cause with an eloquent performance of his magnum opus, the Requiem Mass in C minor.

Then, after a decent pause for intermission cheer and psychic readjustment, they surveyed the younger composer’s “Solemn Vespers of the Confessor” and suggested--perhaps unwittingly--that even minor Mozart is more provocative than major Salieri.

This was an evening distinguished by unusual repertory and enlightened music-making. A rather brief evening, to be sure--it lasted less than an hour and a half--but a stimulating one, nevertheless.

When Salieri wrote his Requiem in 1804, he intended it to mark his voluntary withdrawal from the world of opera and other trivial pursuits. “Extravagance and confusion of styles,” he complained, had “replaced rationality and majestic simplicity.”

By that time, the presumably “extravagant and confused” Mozart had already been dead more than a dozen years. Salieri’s solemn Mass received its premiere, according to the composer’s wishes, only at his own funeral in 1825.

It is, indeed, a work that exalts the virtues of rationality and majestic simplicity. It is powerful in its fluid choral utterances, subtle in its orchestration, affecting in its rhetorical understatement.

Sophisticated or impatient ears may tire of certain linear repetitions. They may lament the unimaginative use of the solo quartet. Nevertheless, the sweep and lyrical grandeur of Salieri’s Mass is undeniable. Conservatism in support of expressive honesty need not be a vice.

Hall should have been using this engagement to present his credentials as a possible successor to Roger Wagner as head of the Master Chorale. Contrary to early announcements, however, the management had already made plans that reduced the public audition to a futile exercise.

The visiting maestro emerged as an undaunted prophet without sufficient local honor, calmly reproducing the precision, suavity, warmth and dynamic flexibility that long have been Hall-marks, as it were, of his own chorale. With the gentle but telling introduction of vocal embellishments, he also reminded us that he is a thoughtful stylist. And, unlike some notable colleagues, he actually conducted the Sinfonia Orchestra; he didn’t just beat time.

The only questionable element in his performance involved the omission of the “Libera me.” The anticlimactic cut was made on the surprising, undocumented assumption that the finale wasn’t really the work of Salieri himself.

Hall focused the rapture, the piety, the shifts of tone, texture and color in Mozart’s decidedly unconservative Vespers with comparably fervent elegance. Here, again, he inspired virtuoso singing from the chorus and solid responses from the orchestra--the timbre of which was hardly enriched by a tacky portable organ.

Ruth Golden’s soprano soared sweetly in “Laudate Dominum.” The remaining soloists, promising but underemployed, were Leslie Richards, Jonathan Mack and Peter van Derick.