MUSIC REVIEW : Chorale Gives Dvorak His Birthday Due

In the rush to get on the Mozart bicentennial bandwagon, everyone seems to have shortchanged Antonin Dvorak, whose 150th birthday was Sept. 8.

Well, almost everyone, for John Alexander, the indefatigable conductor of the Pacific Chorale, decided to do some digging for his group’s concert at Segerstrom Hall Saturday night.

To his credit, Alexander’s search yielded two worthy, nearly unknown Dvorak choral works--both of which carried an unmistakably timely message of hands-off-the-Czech-people.

“Psalm 149,” partly a setting of the psalm and partly a warning to foreign kings, is a marvelously fervent 8 1/2-minute piece, with a powerful orchestral buildup to the choral entrance. The second work, Hymnus: “Dedicove Bile Hory” (Heirs of the White Mountain)--running about twice the time--is less striking, more dependent upon Germanic models like Wagner and, in the grand orchestral coda, Bruckner.

Alas, a good deal of the impact of these works was lost through no fault of the performers; the printer never delivered the texts and translations for the programs. Alexander tried to fill the gap beforehand by reciting the text of the Psalm and outlining the gist of the Hymnus, but the music basically was on its own. And the Pacific Chorale did what it could, singing (in Czech) with unified gusto and vigor, accompanied with bite by members of the Pacific Symphony.

Haydn’s buoyant, implicitly pacifistic “Missa in Tempore Belli” (Mass in Time of War) was a good choice for a companion work, yet it didn’t come off. Lean, brisk tempos are a fine idea, but this performance was too rushed, without much compensation in the form of breathing space or propulsive rhythm.

It was like a tour guide hustling his group from one view to the next--with the tourist performers huffing and puffing to stay with one another. In any case, the outstanding vocal soloist was the rolling, sonorous bass of Louis Lebherz; his variable colleagues were Jennifer Smith (soprano), Patricia McAfee (mezzo-soprano) and Beau Palmer (tenor).

As an encore, Alexander brought out a moving, once-outlawed Estonian hymn that the chorale learned during its tour of Estonia last June. But to follow it with “America the Beautiful” struck this listener as a rather smug gesture after all of the generous tributes to oppressed peoples.