MUSIC REVIEW : L.A. Master Chorale Performs Sans Orchestra

It can be argued that only the truest devotee would choose to program a whole concert for unaccompanied voices.

But Paul Salamunovich, music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, proved his conviction and more Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when he led 60 members through an a cappella evening.

By its end, few could doubt his belief that the human voice is the most perfect and versatile of instruments. Such was the loving care and attention he lavished on his singers. Such was the virtuosic response they delivered in kind.

Salamunovich’s agenda spanned four centuries--starting with the obligatory Palestrina and including Bruckner, Schoenberg, Copland and Vaughan Williams.

It was an ear-opener. Not just because the performance quantified and clarified every line and strand of sound but also because the distinctive style of the composers could be heard even apart from their usual symphonic setting.

The Vaughan Williams Mass, for example, gathered itself together at times for surges of quickened uplift and modal affirmation.

The splintered harmonies of Schoenberg’s 1907 “Friede auf Erden” yield the composer’s last tonal cries. The chorale gave exultant voice to them.

So did mezzo-soprano Lesley Leighton offer a solid presence to Copland’s “In the Beginning.”

Notable were the sleights-of-larynx by Hugo Alfven (gorgeous tapering phrases) and Grigory Lvovsky (fast-clip syllables powered on an extraordinary crescendo-diminuendo scale).

But it was in founder Roger Wagner’s arrangement of “Danny Boy”--the first stanza--that the sense of one voice, one breath, one mind resonated. And made the evening everything it promised.