Master Chorale Pays Tribute to Roger Wagner

The Los Angeles Master Chorale’s celebratory performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday was all about history-in-the-making, or, more to the point, history-already-made. With its program, “A Roger Wagner Celebration,” the formidable choral group paid tribute to Wagner, the pioneering and widely popular choral director who died in 1992.

Numbers counted for something, this being the 50th anniversary of the Roger Wagner Chorale and the 35th anniversary of the L.A. Master Chorale, which Wagner founded. For this occasion, current music director Paul Salamunovich--who, he noted, was 11 when he first heard Wagner in concert--offered a concise survey of music often programmed and arranged by Wagner, beginning with the world of Palestrina and Gregorian chant.

The concert was framed by two versions of a signature Wagner piece, the “Ave Maria” of Tomas Luis de Vittoria. The current chorale opened the concert with the work, and a large contingent of alumni gathered on stage at concert’s end to offer another, richer-textured version, a fitting close that was also dedicated to another choral leader, Robert Shaw (who died Monday).

Jeannine Wagner, the Roger Wagner Chorale’s present music director and the conductor’s daughter, led the group in a set of secular Renaissance pieces by Monteverdi and Lassus, as well as music of Bach, including “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” featuring pianist Dwayne Condon circulating amid the choral signposts.

In the concert’s second half, the Master Chorale stopped at a set of Brahms waltzes while easing its way into mild-mannered, not-necessarily-serious 20th century fare, with arrangements of western songs, “Danny Boy” and songs from Copland’s heartland opera “Tender Land.” This branch of the Wagner story touched on a time, from the ‘40s through the ‘60s, when choral music had much more of a marketable public visibility and wasn’t viewed as an esoteric, if vital, tributary in the music world.

All in all, the concert proved to be an aptly multidirectional tribute to the diverse Wagner, who put Los Angeles on the choral map, along with establishing that map in the first place.