MUSIC REVIEW : Orange Coast Singers Take Their Turn at Paying Homage to Mozart

Everywhere you go this year, the Mozart glut follows, devouring everything in its path. In attempting to honor a genius, we have created a monster, one that appears to be a boon for the box office but unhealthy for those who need a more varied musical diet.

Saturday night, before a good-size turnout in the sweltering Red Hill Lutheran Church, it was the Orange Coast Singers’ turn to pay homage to Wolfgang Amadeus. With just one exception, the menu contained typical overexposed meat-and-potatoes fare, honorably performed but with hardly a flash of new or unexpected insight. Granted, the latter is a tall order, but at least one ought to try.

That said, music director Richard Raub carefully guided his skilled 37-voice group through the Sussmayr edition of the Requiem, producing a light-textured, puffy, amorphous choral tone that sounded larger than the numbers would indicate. While Raub could whip up some heated fire and brimstone in the Dies Irae and Rex tremendae, other sections that could have been treated with more heartfelt sensitivity tended to slide uneventfully by.

Yet Raub’s cause was aided by a very accomplished vocal quartet, topped--or actually, underpinned--by the tremendous, endlessly deep, even frightening bass of Kevin Bell. The quartet was smoothly rounded out by Sylvia Wen’s liquid soprano, Bruce Johnson’s steady, dependable lyric tenor, and Martha Jane Weaver’s caressing mezzo-soprano.

The sole rarity of the evening was the brief Dixit et Magnificat, K. 193, a robust slice of Baroque-drenched early Mozart laced with bracing outbreaks of polyphony. Interestingly, this received the most invigorating performance of the evening, though the balances often favored the orchestra too heavily.

Giving his singers a break before intermission, Raub took the orchestra through a rather colorless, mostly leisurely (except for the Finale) reading of the Symphony No. 29. Despite the undeniably competent, cohesive playing of the orchestra, the performance sounded depressingly beaten-down--which, in fairness, could possibly be attributed to the oppressive heat in the church.