Music : Currie Leads L.A. Chorale

The John Currie era at the Los Angeles Master Chorale is drawing rapidly to its coda, with his successor as of Sept. 1, Paul Salamunovich, announced on Friday.

Currie’s achievement here is bound to be a subject for debate, as he essentially dismantled Roger Wagner’s robust, clearly delineated choral blend and installed a softer-focused, rather amorphous sound of his own. In programmatic terms, Currie is going out on an unmistakeably high-minded note, given the contents Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Top-flight choral Haydn turned out to be the appetizer, and the main course began with the brief, exuberant Te Deum and concluded with the invigorating “Nelson” Mass. Appropriately, Currie likes fleet, driving tempos in the Mass’ energetic sections, and he enforced abrupt shifts into fast gears even if it meant a few bars of scrambling by his forces to adjust.

Still, this conception needed something more incisive than soft-edged attacks and fuzzy enunciation from the mid-sized Chorale and merely adequate playing from the Sinfonia of Los Angeles. There were compensations from the well-blended solo vocal quartet--Susan Montgomery’s plaintive soprano, Debbie Cree’s more impassioned mezzo-soprano, Neil Mackie’s sweet tenor and David Arnold’s smooth baritone.

We also had a chance to hear Britten’s rarely performed “Cantata Misericordium,” a performance dedicated to the organization for which it was written, the International Red Cross. Dating from 1963, only a year after the premiere of the pacifistic “War Requiem,” “Cantata Misericordium” channels the message of the Requiem down a different path: helping your fellow man in need.

Britten brilliantly sketched his 20-minute drama in taut, concise, inwardly directed, unsentimental terms, and there are gorgeous, delicate moments for harp and piano behind the singers. Unfortunately, the text is in Latin--that has a distancing effect, reducing the impact of Britten’s message. But Currie drew a more vivid response from the Master Chorale here than in Haydn, and steady, low-key performances from soloists Mackie and Arnold.