MUSIC REVIEW : Choral Voices Excel in Beethoven’s Mass

Any encounter with Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” winds up with performers, and usually the music itself, suffering some bruises. Still, hardy, often misguided souls keep trying to tame this hectoring, exultant monster, to impose shapeliness on a collection of lofty peaks and barely enough valleys to sustain them.

In a well-attended presentation of the Mass on Saturday in Segerstrom Hall of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, conductor William Hall took the music on its own rugged terms.

What particularly impressed was the flexibility and cohesiveness of the choral forces: the William Hall Master Chorale and Chapman University Singers, some 150 singers in all, who produced the requisite grand sonorities with consistent textual clarity. Less readily achieved, and therefore all the more welcome, was their agility, cleanly projecting the many intricate fugal passages. A special note of appreciation for the thrust and solidity of the tenor contingent, often a choral organization’s weak link, in “Et incarnatus” and “Etresurrexit.”

What Beethoven chiefly asks of his solo vocalists is that they make it without major mishap to the end of his nearly 80-minute-long lungbuster. The present quartet--soprano Carol Neblett, mezzo Catherine Stoltz, tenor Jonathan Mack, bass Louis Lebherz--complied, although in reaching for additional volume Neblett pushed her already large soprano to the point of extreme stridency.

The ever-reliable Mack again proved a pillar of strength, his instrument having gained in amplitude and tonal richness what it has lost in sweetness over the past decade, while Lebherz made the most of his biggest moment, ushering in the final “Agnus dei” with warm, rolling basso tone.

Aside from some strong woodwinds and the noble, firmly-etched violin solo of Michele Makarski, the pickup orchestra proved scrappy in general and frequently undernourished in the upper strings.

A stern reprimand, too, for the high-tech troglodyte who allowed his or her beeper to go off in the otherwise shattering silence that followed the gigantic exertions of the “Gloria.”