Music : L.A. Master Chorale Opens Currie’s Final Season at Pavilion

Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is one of those pieces that was born a monument, more often saluted than performed. Its choral terrors are legend and its interpretive complexities daunting. Sublimity was never easy.

Saturday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Beethoven’s Mass was the inaugural vehicle for John Currie’s final season with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Inevitably, it took the measure of the man and his chorus, to say nothing of the Sinfonia orchestra and a quartet of soloists.

The frustratingly incomplete accomplishment could well be a paradigm for Currie’s tenure here. Always an uncommonly score-bound conductor, Currie often let the work slip from limber glory into lumbering banality, usually at the least likely moment.

The Gloria, for example, began well, though majestic rather than ecstatic. But the concluding fugues moved from the ponderous to the scrambled, in a welter of unrelated tempos and awkward transitions.

Something similar happened in the Credo, following an unnecessary intermission. What had seemed slow but playfully controlled buoyancy launching “Et vitam venturi” quickly became merely slow, unredeemed by the ensuing frenzy.

And so it went. In the main, Currie’s tempos were conservative, though when he opted for speed he pushed for the maximum possible. His dynamic scale was huge and apt, though the orchestra did not prove as flexible there as the chorus, skewing balances at the extremes.

The 124-voice chorus provided potent and accommodating resources. The great ascending rockets that Beethoven sets off throughout the work could burst in a raucous shout from the tenors and basses, but otherwise this was choral singing of optimal impact, articulate in both text and music.

The soloists occasionally lingered longer on a note than Currie wanted, though not justifying the in-your-face cues and pedestrian subdivisions he foisted on them, binding them rather than accompanying them. Soprano Carolann Page offered amplitude and nuance at the top, warmly and evenly seconded by mezzo Christine Cairns. Tenor Agostino Castagnola sounded wan and strained in the ascents, but baritone Anthony Michaels-Moore delivered a solid, expressive foundation.

Concertmaster and personnel manager Stuart Canin soared sweetly and fluently in the Praeludium and Benedictus solo. The orchestra he assembled gave good weight despite intermittent patches of misintonation from the winds and struggles in the strings with Currie’s abrupt gear changes.