Chorale Master’s Mission: Back to the Future : Music: New director Paul Salamunovich aims to reconnect the group with its glory days in a time of fiscal uncertainty.

If there were anyone who shouldn’t need an introduction to the Los Angeles Master Chorale, it is Paul Salamunovich. After all, the 63-year-old musician saw the organization founded 27 years ago, and served it as singer and assistant conductor for many years.

But as new music director, Salamunovich finds himself cast in the role of local hero, embarked on a quest to reconnect the Master Chorale to its storied past while looking ahead to an uneasy future filled with challenges to his audience-building and fund-raising abilities as well as to his musical talents.

At his first rehearsal as music director, Salamunovich’s initial step was to remind his singers of his ties to the chorus’ roots. He even brought in a 44-year-old picture, showing himself among the young vocal lions of Roger Wagner’s Los Angeles Concert Youth Chorus, from which came the Roger Wagner Chorale and, ultimately, the Master Chorale.

For the last five years, however, the chorus that Wagner built has been in the charge of John Currie. To the ears of many, the period found the venerable institution cut off from its choral heritage, yet without a clear direction for the future.

“I expect to take back your tone about 25 years,” Salamunovich told his singers at that first rehearsal last month. “The choir has been top-heavy, very top-heavy. I want to get back to a pyramid blend, to the sound of an over-tone choir.”

The new-old sound of the Master Chorale--24 of the 116 singers are different from last season--gets its first public hearing Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The new era is already a hit, however, where it counts most. Subscriptions are up 37% over last season, to 1,040.

“We’re in good financial condition,” says board president Marshall Rutter of the Chorale’s $1.6-million budget. He says that his organization is financially healthy enough to avoid any prospect of sharing the fate of the Joffrey Ballet, whose resident status at the Music Center was terminated last season after years of poor earned income and reliance on the Music Center Unified Fund.

Not that the chorus is without hurdles at the Music Center. Long the institutional stepchild, the Master Chorale was the resident company that blinked when a March schedule conflict cropped up with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Both had booked the Pavilion on the same date, and in order to accommodate a touring ensemble presented by the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale moved its concert to an earlier date after its season-ticket booklets already had been printed.

And now that concert has been entirely replanned, as a result of the much-bruited Unified Fund shortfall. Helmuth Rilling was to have conducted the West Coast premiere of “Messa per Rossini”--instead he will lead Bach’s B-minor Mass, with a smaller orchestra and chorus.

The Chorale received $400,000 last year from the Unified Fund, and was promised an increase to $450,000 this season--now it will get $350,000. The $100,000 turnaround also has left Salamunovich with reduced rehearsal time, eliminated flowers from the Master Chorale stage, and aborted a planned newsletter for subscribers.

For quite practical reasons then, as well as artistic missionary work, building audience is the key element of Salamunovich’s current thinking. Noting the increasing absence of classical choral music from schools and churches, where earlier generations of listeners and singers alike were exposed to the potential glories of the choral repertory, Salamunovich feels a heavy responsibility to draw in new audiences.

“There must be something for everybody,” he says. “We live in an age when choral music isn’t known to the general public.”

The Master Chorale has a committee exploring long-range planning, but tour, recording and out-of-town projects await funding.

Some of these plans involve Rilling. According to Rutter, the Master Chorale would like to establish some sort of ongoing principal-guest-conductor relationship with the Stuttgart maestro.

Rilling-led projects such as a mini-Bach festival, Rutter suggests, might involve collaboration with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Members of that orchestra, already the primary pit band for the Music Center Opera, will be featured in the Chorale’s supporting Sinfonia this season. Steven Scharf, LACO’s personnel manager, will be the contractor for the Sinfonia, and LACO concertmaster Ralph Morrison will also head the Master Chorale ensemble.

With a new director busy instilling his own sound in the choir, new singers and new instrumentalists, rehearsals for the opening concert were spared cuts. Salamunovich, who still evinces all the enthusiasm which brought him into this work as a teen-ager, is much impressed with the progress.

“I’m surprised and delighted at their pace,” he says. “They’re really reaching me, at least. They’re putting out their hearts.”