MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Pacific Chorale Goes on Sentimental French Excursion : The program Saturday will include two of the director’s favorites, Florent Schmitt’s Psalm No. 47 and Poulenc’s Stabat Mater.

John Alexander’s fascination with the music of Florent Schmitt dates back to his college days.

“I discovered him when I was doing my doctoral studies in Illinois way back in the ‘60s,” the Pacific Chorale’s music director said in a phone interview Monday from his home in Los Angeles.

“My major project was on the Berlioz Requiem. I found this guy and I thought, ‘This is just unbelievable music.’ ”

Alexander will conduct Schmitt’s Psalm No. 47, among works by other French composers, on the Pacific Chorale program Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Alexander led the chorale in the West Coast premiere of the Schmitt Psalm (“O Clap Your Hands, All Ye People”) in 1976, when the group was still giving concerts at the First Baptist Church of Santa Ana.

“I paired it with the Mozart Requiem, but the audience went wild over the Schmitt,” Alexander said. “We’ve had it requested more than any piece we’ve ever done. On our audience surveys, this piece continually comes up for a repeat.”

But who is--or, rather, was --Schmitt?

“I was talking to some of the orchestra players the other day, and they didn’t know who he was either,” Alexander said. “He’s not performed a lot in this country, but in France, Florent Schmitt is considered one of their great, monumental composers.”

Schmitt was born in 1870 and died in 1958. He won the Prix de Rome in 1900 and wrote the Psalm when he was in Italy, fulfilling the resident obligations that go with the Rome prize. The piece premiered in Paris in 1904 and quickly established Schmitt’s reputation as an important composer. “In France, it’s still considered his monument, even though it’s an early work,” Alexander said.

“Schmitt was influenced a little bit by everybody,” he continued. “He follows in the tradition of Faure and Debussy and Ravel, particularly Ravel, in his orchestration. But in the size and scope of the work--the size of the forces--he leans much more toward the way Mahler uses the orchestra. I don’t know any work by Ravel that has everything going at the same time that the chorale is singing.”

Besides that volume of sound, the work is “very difficult because of the extreme tessitura for the choir.”

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Alexander said the French program has been in the works for a while.

“I decided about two years ago that I wanted to do an all-French program,” he said. “We don’t hear enough French choral music in this country. In orchestral programming, French literature holds a firm place. But in choral literature, we tend to ignore French music, compared with German and English music.”

Why? For starters, “the French language is definitely harder to get across, and also singers are less trained in singing French,” Alexander said. “They’re immaculately trained in Italian and German and Latin. But as soon as you go to French, you have serious rehearsal problems.

“French doesn’t look on the page the way it sounds,” he explained. “Classical French singing makes huge changes from the way French is spoken : The way you deal with ‘r,’ for instance, in the singing of popular music, which uses the way you normally speak. Spoken French ‘r’s’ are quite guttural. How do you create that sound when singing and holding the vowels? You change it to an Italian ‘r.’

“Some other sounds simply don’t relate well to the voice . . . so the singer does a lot of things to revise the language so that it sings well. There is always that language barrier.”

The program also will include Alexander’s “favorite French work of all time: Poulenc’s Stabat Mater. We’ve done his Gloria several times,” he said. “It’s fairly well known. But the Stabat Mater is seldom done, and to my mind, it’s the superior work.”

The Stabat Mater was written in 1950, the Gloria in 1959. The Stabat Mater is “sometimes called the a cappella work because of the way Poulenc orchestrated it. It uses a large orchestra, triple woodwinds and so on, but the choir does a lot of a cappella work. There are very few moments when you have the full orchestral force going all the time.

“With some works, you have balance problems with huge sounds of the orchestra against the choir. That doesn’t happen in the Poulenc.”

The work’s “greatest asset,” however, is “a beautiful melody,” Alexander said. “That’s why I chose (soprano) Benita Valente as the soloist, because she is able to spin a melody in a beautiful way, which is the first thing you go looking for in the soprano soloist.”

Faure’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” also has “a wonderful lyric melody for the soprano soloist. Faure’s Requiem is probably his best known choral work,” Alexander said, “but the ‘Cantique de Jean Racine,’ which is seldom done, is absolutely beautiful. We will be opening the program with that.”

Originally written with organ accompaniment, the chorale will give a premiere of an orchestration made by USC professor James Hopkins.

Olivier Messiaen’s “O Sacrum Continuum,” the remaining work on the program, dates to “just before the Second World War. What you see in it is Messiaen’s desire not to have any recurring rhythms,” Alexander said.

“It has continually changing rhythm. Every bar in the piece has a different rhythmic value. But it’s an early work, very much in the style of Debussy and his tone colors and harmonic fabric. Altogether, there is tremendous variety on the program.”

* John Alexander will conduct the Pacific Chorale in works by Faure, Poulenc, Messiaen and Florent Schmitt on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Benita Valente will be the soprano soloist. $15 to $40. (714) 252-1234.

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HELP WANTED: The Royal Ballet of Great Britain will hold auditions May 2 for adults in non-dancing roles in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Mayerling.” An audition for a young male dancer to appear in the role of the Changeling Boy in Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream” will be May 6. The company’s engagement is May 3 through 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 556-2787, Ext. 557.