L.A. Chorale Adds Polish to ‘Treasures’

Paul Salamunovich has done it again. He put together an intelligent, thematic program mixing familiar with seldom heard and, with his Los Angeles Master Chorale, performed it tastefully and persuasively.

Not that all--or any--of the music on this concert titled “Jewish Treasures” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Sunday night was top-drawer material, but the performances made it sound nearly so.

The second half was devoted to Ernest Bloch’s “Sacred Service” (Avodath Hakodesh), a 50-minute setting of a Jewish worship service for cantor, choir and large orchestra. Consistently high in craftsmanship and sincere in utterance, lightly spiced with Semitic musical elements, “Sacred Service” nevertheless invigorates about as much as a United Nations position paper--it loses something in its urge to universality.

The non-narrative text, without conflict, must have something to do with it. Only at the end, when The End is contemplated, does the music take on a dark, forbidding and wondrous quality of compelling interest.

Baritone Ian Geller sang the cantor part with fervor and ready control of style. The Chorale and Sinfonia Orchestra made epic and meditative sounds with ease, in a finely honed reading.

A rarity, Korngold’s brief “Passover Psalm,” a rather glitzy Hollywood-style concoction, sonorously performed, began the evening. The peak of the concert came with a pointed, well-cut and rhythmically graceful account of Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” Salamunovich everywhere enforced clarity, and the Chorale caressed, whispered, declaimed and delineated neatly and confidently. The orchestra offered poised and characterful playing. Fourteen-year-old treble Michael Waring, after some initial wavering, gave a solid and touching account of Psalm 23.