MUSIC REVIEWS : CHOIR FROM LATVIA AT ROYCE HALL

Many in the audience in Royce Hall on Friday held tiny Latvian flags. They had obviously assembled for the Los Angeles debut of the Ave Sol Chamber Choir from Riga as much for patriotic reasons as for musical ones.

So it came as a pleasant surprise when the mixed chorus of 35 members, clad in vivid regional costumes, confounded expectations of nationalist provincialism. Under the jolly but expert command of Imants Kokars, Ave Sol turned in a theatrical, confident and sophisticated performance of repertory ranging from bittersweet Latvian folk melodies to 16th-Century European choral polyphony and state-of-the-art vocal experimentation.

To a large extent, the program reflected Latvia’s rich choral and musical tradition, along with its difficult position as a Baltic crossroads between Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Russia (since 1940 it has been a republic of the Soviet Union). Unfortunately, Ave Sol did not illustrate the country’s strong Lutheran choral heritage.

Melancholy pervades the Latvian musical sensibility. Deliberate rhythms and surprising harmonies in close intervals filled arrangements of folk songs by contemporary Latvian composers, many of them performed here with light choreography. For some numbers, the singers played folk instruments, including hand-held chimes and reed pipes.

Light and reedy in timbre, the voices used little vibrato. Pitch was near-perfect throughout, and the balance generally good, if a bit top-heavy.

The performances of non-Latvian music proved accurate but somewhat wooden. A flat, perfunctory interpretation of excerpts from a powerful setting of Pushkin poems by Soviet composer Georgi Sviridov failed to satisfy.

Particularly successful was a witty performance of Swedish composer Folke Rabe’s experiment in vocal sound, “Rondo.” Full of abrupt and precisely executed shifts between singing, talking, moaning, groaning and permutations of humming, it proved that Ave Sol is very much aware of the world beyond Riga.