MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Winter Solstice’ Bright Addition to Holiday Fare

Considering the wealth of music written to celebrate Christmas,most music organizations suffer acute poverty of imagination when the season rolls around. A surfeit of “Messiah” permutations and banal carol medleys return as predictably as department store Santas.

The La Jolla Civic-University Orchestra and Chorus, however, has regularly proved a welcome exception to this dull convention. In Sunday’s holiday concert at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, choral director David Chase indulged in a premiere, giving the first American performance of Andrezj Panufnik’s 1972 “Winter Solstice.” The Polish emigre composer became a British subject in 1961 and was knighted for his musical achievements in January, nine months before his death.

Panufnik’s five-movement cantata for chorus, soloists, brass and percussion was both intellectually and musically stimulating. Based on the early controversy between pagan sun worshipers and the Christians who usurped the winter solstice for their Nativity festival, “Winter Solstice” is a spirited song contest between these opposing forces. Panufnik’s eclectic, unabrasive style encompassed dissonant tonality, chant-like modality and tellingly symbolic bitonalism, which occurred in the third movement when the pagans laud “the Sun our God” and the Christians simultaneously praise “the Son of God.”

In the second movement, while the men of the chorus quietly intoned a litany of goddesses from Isis to Freya, guest soprano Susan Lynn Dixon dramatically soared above them as Earth Mother. In the fourth movement, UC San Diego faculty member Philip Larson plumbed the depths of his rich baritone to chant portions of a sermon by St. Augustine, urging Christians to “worship not the sun, but Him who made the sun.” All of this theological warfare was resolved--perhaps a bit too easily--in the final movement when both sides joined to hymn the New Year, accompanied by dense trumpet and trombone fanfares.

Chase’s chorus sang the Panufnik with conviction and clear diction. Earlier on the program they dispatched Daniel Pinkham’s “Christmas Cantata” with ease, sprinting through Chase’s brisk tempos with clean ensembles and appropriately bright timbres. If the the Pinkham brass contingent had been equally well-drilled, the performance would have been memorable.

In Jan Sweelinck’s unaccompanied Christmas motet “Hodie Christus Natus Est,” the chorus lost some of its focus and secure declamation due to Chase’s broad, overly deliberate tempo. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ tender anthem “Blessed Son of God” displayed the ensemble’s ability to imitate the sweet, pure sonorities of English choral singing.

Music director Thomas Nee and the Civic-University Orchestra opened the concert with equally unhackneyed offerings. Nee made Respighi’s “Trittico Botticelliano” sound fresh and innocent. In both the Respighi and Vaughan William’s Fantasia on “Greensleeves,” the strings displayed a surprisingly lush timbre for a community orchestra. Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Aria della Battaglia” and Leopold Stokowski’s campy arrangement of J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, however, sounded under-rehearsed and suffered from weak ensemble playing.