Evensong Caps Choristers’ 25th Year

Contrasted with their East Coast counterparts, San Diego cultural institutions are mere youngsters. Nevertheless, St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral lavished more than a bit of ceremony last weekend celebrating the 25th anniversary of its men and boys’ choir, the Cathedral Choristers.

These festivities culminated Sunday afternoon in a traditional service of Evensong followed by a concert of English cathedral music. Larry King, the choir’s founder, returned from New York City to conduct his new composition, “Benedictus, Es Domine,” dedicated to the Choristers.

Although the primary duties of this choral group are liturgical, the boys of St. Paul’s are now beyond the confines of the cathedral. They have been heard with the San Diego Opera in productions of “Tosca,” “La Boheme,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Carmen,” where their on-stage antics were anything but devotional. They also have performed with the San Diego Symphony and annually serenade the diners at the Hotel del Coronado’s Crown Room on Christmas Eve.

Although this type of choral group is usually called a boys’ choir, the unchanged treble voices of the youngster are balanced by a small counterpart of men’s voices to sing the lowest parts, according to Edgar Billups, the Choristers’ current director.

In 1968, five years after King started the choir, he left St. Paul’s for a post at New York City’s prestigious Trinity Church Wall Street, which he still serves. Reached last week at his parents’ home in Fullerton, King explained his interest in this unusual breed of choral organization.

“I was a boys’ choir freak from the first moment I heard their unique sound,” King said. “My first experience was when I heard the men and boys of Los Angeles’ St. Paul’s Cathedral sing in the Los Angeles Bach Festival at the Congregational Church. Up to that time, I was accustomed to hearing wobbling women’s voices.”

Later, King encountered the English boys’ choir tradition firsthand while studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music on a Fulbright scholarship. He then returned to New York City to apprentice under Alec Wyton at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which had a noted boys’ choir with its own residential school on the cathedral grounds.

A few years later, King found himself back in his native California at St. Paul’s. At that time, the church had about 400 boys in the fourth- to eighth-grade age bracket, making it the perfect place for a boys’ choir, according to King.

“I recall that the San Diego music scene then was just beginning to bloom,” he said. “They had just opened the new concert hall (Civic Theatre), and Zubin Mehta regularly brought the Los Angeles Philharmonic down to perform.”

Some of King’s earliest compositions were written for his nascent San Diego choir. Calculation rather than inspiration sparked the first piece.

“I had to have a grand success at the beginning, so I wrote a piece that featured the choir’s best sounds placed in the highest range.”

At Trinity he received many commissions for organ works, and a few years ago he was asked to write the musical score for “The Glory of Easter,” a seasonal spectacular produced at the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Orange County.

“It’s quite a production, although the live tiger always steals the show,” King mused.

Billups sent invitations to about 250 former choristers to attend the weekend celebration. Just under 50 returned to join the Choristers at Sunday’s concert to sing C. H. Parry’s anthem “Jerusalem,” an unabashedly British work almost unknown in this country until it was featured in the film “Chariots of Fire.”

The healing powers of music will be put to the test every Tuesday afternoon at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. A grant from the Muriel Gluck Endowment will provide chamber music concerts in the Green Hospital lobby for clinic patients and their friends. UC San Diego professor Bertram Turetzky is organizing the programming, which will include performers from the university community. Harpist Susan Allen opened the series last week, and UCSD resident cellist Peter Farrell will perform with the Grossmont Quartet today at 3 p.m.

All in the family. When Marie Olesen was installed last week as new president of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, she continued a family tradition. Her husband, Merrel Olesen, was president from 1979-1982.

The two met while he was carrying out his executive duties for the society, and they were married in 1981. While becoming a chamber music aficionado was not part of their wedding vows, when Merrel stepped off the board, Marie joined it. With her sister Michelle Ellingsen, Marie co-chaired the local preparations that brought the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to La Jolla in 1983 and 1984.

If it’s Tuesday . . .. Seventy-three members of the La Jolla Civic/University Symphony Chorus, accompanied by a string ensemble from the orchestra, will give seven performances in 13 days on their first European concert tour, July 13-27. Under conductor David Chase, they will perform mainly American choral music for their European audiences, although at the Esterhazy Palace in Eisenstadt, Austria, where Haydn spent most of his career, they will sing a Mozart Missa Brevis. Chase and his singers will present a pair of preview concerts of the tour, the first on June 19, at the Solana Beach Presbyterian Church, and again on June 26 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Pacific Beach.