Gregg Smith Singers Throw a 40th Anniversary Bash

Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the air was thick with nostalgia, celebration and fine music-making as the Gregg Smith Singers celebrated its 40th anniversary in the city of its birth.

Smith launched the acclaimed choral group while a student at UCLA, and based it out of Los Angeles for a dozen years before heading to New York.

Going for a kaleidoscopic, nearly three-hour overview rather than a focused program, this Monday Evening Concert had a this-is-your-life aspect to it. At program’s end, local alumni of the group even joined the current ranks to create a voluminous ensemble sound.

A sense of homecoming was inescapable. Local luminaries were well-represented, as usual in Smith’s programs: Stravinsky’s brief, pungent “Anthem: The Dove Descending” and Schoenberg’s aridly emotive choral works from 1925 were performed with customary clarity. Ditto, two pieces from Ives.

Works by Elliott Carter, Samuel Barber and Louise Talma were given sharp readings in a segment of 20th century American music--a Smith specialty--and the group later served up a masterful Monteverdi.

California-based composers also had input. Ralph Swickard’s striking settings of Octavio Paz poems evoked impressionistic luster, with almost jazz-like harmonic swerves, while Eric Whitacre’s Paz setting was more ephemeral. Dale Jergenson’s improvisation-laced setting of Ferlinghetti’s darkly comic rumination on life with heroin was in stark contrast to John Biggs’ ambitiously antiphonal “Meditabor.”

One of the evening’s high points came from Smith’s own hand. His “Sound Canticle on Bay Psalm 23” melds a 400-year-old tune, sung by a quartet onstage, with rippling polytonal echoes among singers stationed along the aisles. The modern/ancient merger, handled with customary aplomb, typified the all-embracing grasp of this group.