Chorale Opens Season With Beethoven’s Divine Mass

Beethoven--so asserted J.W.N. Sullivan in his peculiar but irresistible classic study of Beethoven’s spiritual development--was not educable. By this Sullivan meant that this was the least malleable of composers, one faithful only to his own experience.

That quality certainly describes the “Missa Solemnis,” the monumental solemn mass that Beethoven wrote near the end of his life and that Paul Salamunovich used to open the Los Angeles Master Chorale season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night. It is not a churchly mass, but neither is it an irreligious one. It is not a mass that concerns itself with all the weighty philosophical discussion that was current in early 19th century religious thought, but it is music entirely of its time.

Beethoven merely took the mass text, and its message of spiritual affirmation, at face value and then proclaimed it more spectacularly than anyone had before him. It is music utterly ego-driven. For Beethoven, the musical utterance itself was holy, and he meant to use it alone to transport the listener into a spiritual state.

Though not quite as visionary as the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the “Missa Solemnis” is Beethoven’s most colossal composition. Its forces are those of the Ninth Symphony (written about the same time)--orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists--but the mass includes organ and, of course, employs the singers much more. Beethoven called it his greatest work.

Yet it is a work heard surprisingly less often than the Ninth Symphony. When it is heard, it is more often than not thanks to an ambitious choral series like that of the Master Chorale. And the conductors who have the most experience with it also tend to come from the choral world.

But there are also always compromises involved with such performances, as there were Saturday, when the chorus was large, powerful and dominant. The Sinfonia Orchestra, essentially a pickup band, was smaller, underpowered and, one assumes, under-rehearsed. The organ was electric and sounded unnatural. Still, there is much riveting drama in the choral parts.

Beethoven’s mass, so utterly secure in its vision of the spirit soaring, is music without doubts, especially in the choral writing. Amens thunder with invincible force, benedictions are given with some of the most gently consoling music ever written. And Salamunovich, having made a remarkable recovery from cancer surgery less than two months ago, offered a full appreciation of the unwavering confidence of this music. He dug deep into the somber, archaic opening “Kyrie” and “Sanctus,” and he unleashed thrills aplenty in the amens of the “Gloria” and “Credo.”

Still, it was a mixed success. The orchestra was not always on cue or pitch. The battle music of the “Agnus Dei” was, for instance, scrappy, but the resolution into the triumph of grace in the succeeding “Dona Nobis Pacem” was transcendent.

The vocal soloists, too, were inconsistent but could rise to important occasions. Soprano Tamara Matthews (substituting for Angela Blasi, who was ill) unleashed a crude but excitingly operatic torrent of sound in the climaxes, although she was less successful or reliable when required to scale back. Mezzo-soprano Christina Wilcox and bass-baritone Kevin Deas were a well-matched pair--capable of beautiful solo singing, if turning thin when the heat of full ensemble singing was upon them. Tenor Carl Halvorson also found himself straining but not unmusically.

The performance had nice touches and a disturbing one. In the nice department was the floating solo of concertmaster Barry Socher, moonlighting from the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s violin section. In the disturbing department was sign-language interpreter Jon Maher, conducting his own performance (often visually and gesturally at odds with the conductor and music) of the mass text, which was also projected as supertitles.

From a purely gestural standpoint, this preposterously emotive trance-like interpretation of the music proved a highly unmusical nuisance for the uninitiated.

The concert was dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Buffum Chandler. Like Beethoven, she could not be educated, because if she had believed in conventional wisdom, she would never have had the imagination to build the Music Center or to have made a chorus a resident member.