MUSIC REVIEW : New Beginning for Master Chorale

Roger Wagner founded the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 1964.

The Music Center hierarchy may have treated the organization as something of a stepchild resident. The eccentricities--egocentricities?--of the feisty director may have caused some ongoing bemusement.

Still, few would deny that the chorale was a major cultural asset to the city. Under Wagner, it could make glorious, even uplifting sounds in a rewarding variety of professional contexts.

In 1986, the management embarked on a nasty blunder. Wagner was unceremoniously discarded. His successor, John Currie, was imported from Scotland. Instantly and perhaps insensitively, Currie made wholesale changes both in the personnel of the chorus and in its aesthetic perspective. He amassed little sympathy in the process.

Now, the powers are trying to make overdue amends. Paul Salamunovich, who had served as Wagner’s selfless man Friday (also Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) in the early years, has been appointed music director in the wake of Currie’s so-called resignation.

Clearly a popular choice, Salamunovich has long been admired for his academic work centered at Loyola Marymount, not to mention his churchly duties at St. Charles Borromeo in North Hollywood. He is a modest, no-nonsense podium personality who doesn’t even bother with applause-engendering exits and entrances between numbers. He also happens to be a superb technician blessed with a discerning ear.

The large audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday gave him a standing ovation before he could even muster a downbeat. The reconstituted choir--Salamunovich ventured 24 replacements in ranks numbering 116--sang for him as if lives were at stake.

He favors a broad, smooth, ultra-resonant tone that can swell to mighty climaxes at one extreme, diminish to a shimmering whisper at the other. Nevertheless, he avoids the pitfalls of stridency and mannerism. No doubt about it: The Master Chorale has been returned to a master.

The inaugural concert was a triumph for the man on the podium. In Verdi’s “Quattro Pezzi Sacri,” he sustained delicate balances and striking dramatic contrasts, always within the bounds of decent restraint. He brought comparable luster and fervor to heroic challenges of Howard Hanson, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

That does not mean, alas, that the evening was devoid of problems. Like many a choral specialist before him, Salamunovich concentrated on inexpressive basics when he conducted the orchestra.

The orchestra, incidentally, turned out to be a revised, rejuvenated and underpopulated ensemble that doesn’t even bear the old title--Sinfonia Orchestra--on the billboard page of the program. Essentially a clone of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, it played crudely for Salamunovich in the Verdi but with increasing cohesion thereafter.

Although eight pages of the puffy program magazine were devoted to this concert, texts were deemed expendable. The diction of the chorale under its new leader is clear, but it isn’t--can’t be--that clear.

More troubling questions involved Salamunovich’s repertory choices. Beyond the Verdi, one could find much mush, and not so much substance.

The push-button splendors of Hanson’s “Cherubic Hymn” tend toward sacred turgidity. The Gregorian impressionism of Holst’s “Hymn of Jesus” evolves quickly into neo-romantic goo. An overhyped excerpt from Elinor Remick Warren’s “Legend of King Arthur,” interpolated in tribute to the composer who died last spring, exalted quasi-Victorian banality. This led, all too naturally, to the pious platitudes and soupy climaxes of Vaughan Williams’ “Toward the Unknown Region.”

A little mystical kitsch can go a long way.