MUSIC REVIEW : CHORALE’S OFFERINGS RUN GAMUT

Maurice Allard and the Master Chorale of Orange County offered one of those something-for-everybody concerts that couldn’t fully satisfy anybody Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Allard’s “Glory of Christmas” program ran the gamut from straight classics and warmed-over Romanticism to a Perry Como variety show type of act, audience sing-alongs and a perfunctory “Hallelujah” Chorus.

The pivot point in taste may have been Ken Whitcomb’s truly awful choral/orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s Ave Maria, which maladroitly shifted word accents, altered rhythms and bathed the whole in scoring suitable for a Technicolor movie.

It was one short step down after that to the “mellow” sound of the Californians (17 singers and five microphones). Charles Cassey conducted this mini-group in some insipid pop holiday fare.

Fortunately, Allard opened the concert with a sensitively led, partially staged account of Menotti’s one-act opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Allard had several strong principals. Mitch Lowe, 14, made an appealing, well-acted Amahl, despite some vocal troubles. Susanna Guzman played the mother with affective anguish and sang with power and expressivity.

Rodney Gilfry made a sonorous Melchior; John Weiss, a warbly Balthazar; Fernando Valdes, a wildly off-pitch Kaspar. The small chorus of shepherds and villagers sang brightly.

Stage director Richard Odle (resident scenic/costume director at South Coast Repertory) adroitly moved the singers around a small three-piece unit set placed in front of the 25-member orchestra. He made much out of little, which suited Menotti’s nostalgic appeal to the imagination.

Only the balletic maneuvers of Bonny Beutler and John Denniston, who danced the tarantella, looked stylistically out of place.

Thomas Pasatieri’s “A Joyful Noise” was commissioned by the chorale but nonetheless was given a lukewarm premiere. Allard conducted with expressive animation, but the singers responded without rhythmic incisiveness, clear textures or word sensitivity. Pasatieri’s work (about 10 minutes) set portions of three Psalms in a kind of updated Mendelssohnian counterpoint. The music neither offended, nor inspired, but one suspected there was more to it than that.

The most sensitive singing by the 150-member chorale was heard in the Epilogue from Berlioz’s “L’Enfance du Christ” (despite tentative vocalism from tenor Dale Tracey as the narrator). Sadly, Allard’s careful decrescendo at the end dovetailed into the persistent electronic hum heard from speakers suspended above the stage. The same problem was heard at Henry Mancini’s concert with the Pacific Symphony on Nov. 28. Can’t the technicians do something about this?