Dutch Choir’s Debut Well Worth the Wait

We had to wait for its 60th-anniversary tour, but the Netherlands Chamber Choir finally made its Los Angeles debut on Saturday evening at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall. The much recorded and widely traveled ensemble confirmed its reputation for high technical achievement and versatility, delivering a daunting and varied program with passion and poise.

The 24-voice choir has a flexible, distinctive sound, suggestive at times of a well-matched consort of period wind instruments. Although individual voices occasionally came to the fore in moments of emphasis, the choir sang and breathed as one, spinning supple lines of great tensile strength and peerless textual clarity.

That was immediately required in Bach’s “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied.” Uwe Gronostay, in his last season as chief conductor of the choir, led a buoyant, vital performance of the motet. Enthusiastic application of messa di voce swellings made something of a sonic roller coaster out of the first movement, but momentum never flagged.

On the second half, Gronostay and company offered a gorgeously sung, dramatic account of Samuel Barber’s “Reincarnations” and a light, lush flight through three of Mendelssohn’s choral songs, but that and the Bach was it for familiar repertory. The first half ended with the “Cantus Missae” Mass by Joseph Rheinberger, a richly Romantic setting for double chorus, and the second included two sinuous, opulent settings of Sappho by Ildebrando Pizzetti.

Robert Heppener’s modernist “Del iubilo del core che esce in voce,” expressive to a fault, closed the printed agenda. A part-song by Charles Stanford and a Dutch folk song were the hushed and burnished encores.