MUSIC REVIEW : Gregg Smith Singers Honor Their Roots

When the Gregg Smith Singers were formed 35 years ago, Monday Evening Concerts provided a career-building platform. Smith acknowledged this--explicitly in his verbal remarks, implicitly in his program--on his return this week to the venerable series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bing Theater.

Smith framed the concert with tributes to his roots. A long and fruitful working relationship with Stravinsky sparked the Singers’ efforts in the ‘60s, and Smith began with the remarkable Pentecost anthem “The Dove Descending”--for which the Gregg Smith Singers gave the premiere, almost 30 years ago--followed by Stravinsky’s arrangements of Russian church music and peasant songs.

At the end came Smith’s own setting of Eliot, in five “Landscapes” from 1959. He offered these in honor of his former theory teacher, the very influential Leonard Stein, recently retired from years at the head of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute and whose 75th birthday is Sunday.

The 16-voice choir sounded in need of a warm-up at the beginning, emphasizing acerbic linearity. The singing grew in character and resonance throughout the Russian numbers, marked by a rattling low bass and rhythmic point. Smith’s “Landscapes”--deftly scored and text-sensitive with almost folkloric naturalness--drew warm, evenly blended performances.

Though composed 30 years later and more expansive in harmonic vocabulary, Leo Smit’s settings of five Dickinson poems in “The Last Hour” share much stylistic ground with “Landscapes.” Here, the singing, however, was thoroughly treble dominated.

The radical wing of this genial survey was upheld by Jacob Druckman with “Antiphonies” and Alan Shearer with “From Ages of Day” in three excerpts. As the title suggests, Druckman splits the chorus in his three Hopkins pieces, which sound simply boring despite the wild word painting and hiccuping hocket effects. More intensity and focus was apparent in Shearer’s work--and its performance--which set his own fierce texts as little personal apocalypses.

Quasi-narrative drama came from Hale Smith, in his tight, poignant “Toussaint L’Ouverture--1803” which also provided pianist Jonathan Sherry his only work beyond giving pitches. William Duckworth reinterpreted a handful of shape-note classics in evocative post-minimalist fashion, including bits of gleefully sung fasola .

Humor was supplied in an effective group of Mozart and Schoenberg canons, sung with pertinent panache. Canon and humor also turned up in the lone encore, as Smith led his group off the stage and up an aisle to “Walk in Beauty.”