Concert Singers Offer Recent American Works

Choral music has never needed any special encouragement towards conservatism. If that is not necessarily the state of the art, as the Los Angeles Concert Singers’ daylong symposium Saturday suggested, the culminating concert proved the continuing vitality of established traditions.

Led by director Paul Johnson, the 23-voice Concert Singers offered a pertinent and consistently engaging mini-survey of recent American Romantic works, in the flattering acoustic of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Westwood.

The occasion boasted the West Coast premiere of Stephen Paulus’ “Sacred Songs,” a structurally effective grouping of seven diverse texts, accompanied by organ, flute, oboe and percussion. The fluent settings reflected the moods and something of the roots of the texts, in a rhetorically rich style that recalls Vaughan Williams’ way with Whitman.

Johnson guided a supple performance, although the climax of the work in Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” unraveled. The Concert Singers gave it vitality and thrust in the active passages, though lacking the requisite depth of sound in low ranges for some of the quieter moments.

David Conte’s “In Praise of Music,” for women’s voices, also had its first local hearing. The hushed, fragmentary exaltation of the ending posed some problems for the ensemble, but the singers caught the rapturous sweep of the main portions, bolstered by the bravura pianism of Marc Shapiro.

Local composers were well represented by four of Morten Lauridsen’s intense, stunningly crafted “Madrigali,” and by Craig Phillips’ lyrical Psalm 42. The concert ended with the grandly sentimental “Chamber Music: Six Joyce Songs,” Volume II, of Conrad Susa, ecstatically sung.

The stylistic conservatism of the composers was represented in some ways in their choice of texts: nothing from a living writer. All were united, though, in the clarity and care of the settings, and Johnson and his musicians were most effective in delivering comprehendable, lovingly shaped words.