Making Music . . . and History

The Vatican choir--an ensemble founded nearly half a millennium ago, in 1513--gave its first performances in the United States at Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside last weekend.

To celebrate the mission’s bicentennial, a series of events, including an intertribal powwow and American history reenactments, culminated in a Sunday afternoon concert at the Serra Center with liturgical works by Mozart, Palestrina and Faure and a psalm by Schubert.

Little else was sacred. At the concert: Alfresco bars were set up, commemorative T-shirts were sold. And though ticket prices were high, as much as $125 per seat, most men came in short sleeves. (Good thing: The singers asked that the air-conditioning be turned off.)

Soprano Majella Cullagh, baritone Kevin McMillan, organist Ken Tritle and about 30 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic joined the 40-member choir for the Faure Requiem. Though the work is usually performed using larger forces, the composer wrote it for a number of musicians and singers approximating those under Gilbert Levine’s baton.

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Levine, conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic, persuasively made his case that less is more, getting inside the piece and lovingly shaping its contours while honoring its liturgical roots.

Soprano Cullagh gently soared through the “Pie Jesu,” leaving the impression that she had plenty in reserve. In the “Libera me,” baritone McMillan rose to the occasion, and well above the choir, which had overwhelmed him at times in the Schubert.

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The performance occasionally proved organ-heavy, notably in the closing “In paradisum,” in which a treble figure in the accompaniment dominated the proceedings like a percolator in a coffee commercial.

Levine’s carefully thought-out program opened with a curiously unaffecting rendition of Mozart’s “Ave verum Corpus” that also favored the organ. (The work was written in 1791 for the Feast of Corpus Christi, which coincided with the concert.)

The choir found more buoyancy in Schubert’s Psalm 92, performed in Hebrew, as originally written. (Schubert was a friend of famed Jewish cantor Solomon Sulzer, and, according to scholars, the composer became interested in Judaism in his last years.)

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Drawing on its incredible history, the choir segued into works by Renaissance composer Giovanni da Palestrina. Palestrina served as choirmaster for the Cappella Giulia, and the ensemble continues to perform his liturgy at St. Peter’s, so it came as no surprise that the singers seemed most in their element--and most moving--in his works.

The men’s voices seemed to float effortlessly. Levine elicited admirable hushes in the “Adoramus te” and handily sorted out the six-voice “O domine Jesu Christe.”

The chant portions of Palestrina’s “Vexilla regis” were led by choirmaster Monsignor Don Pablo Colino. It was Colino who in 1980 decided the choir should hire women. Issues of equality aside, during “Pueri Hebraeorum,” an antiphonal work featuring the upper voices, purists in the audience might have yearned for the sound of boys’ voices, the norm for the choir for nearly 500 years.

But whether listeners preferred the choir’s new or traditional sound, it was the sense of history, and of history in the making, that made the concert memorable.