‘Winter’ Solace Fails to Emerge

A world premiere by the Pacific Chorale’s promising new composer-in-residence might have been a bright spot in a tedious muddle of a Christmas program presented by the chorus and Pacific Symphony on Sunday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

But, alas, Eric Whitacre’s “Winter” was a disappointment, contributing little more than additional confusion to a concert that lurched dizzyingly from genre to genre--sacred music, movie music, Christmas carols, you name it.

Whitacre, beginning a three-year residency with the chorus, is an up-and-coming name in the world of serious music. And with good reason: His work can be inventive and affecting.

Last spring, for example, the Pacific Chorale sang Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” and “Water Night,” two enchanting pieces of music full of imaginative writing and an offbeat sense of beauty.

“Winter” was offbeat too but did not manage to say anything very interesting or stir the listener. In a program note and in remarks to the audience before the piece, Whitacre described it as an effort to summon images of gently falling snow, matching in tone the spare, austere text of a poem by one Edward Esch.

But he also had the idea of doing this with the accompaniment of traditional South Asian compositional techniques and instruments, namely the sitar and Bengali tanpura, which produces a droning sound with reeds. The result was a bland, unremarkable piece for chorus and orchestra combined with twanging accompaniment in a way that made no apparent sense.

This was doubly disappointing because the Whitacre piece was the only work on the program that offered the hope of a surprising and rewarding musical experience.

Whitacre pointed this out, with unintentional bluntness, when he remarked to the audience before “Winter” that he “wanted to avoid the typical ‘la-la-la’ Christmas music”--adding, as he recognized the insult he had just delivered to the rest of the program, “With all due respect.”

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There were one or two pleasant moments in the rest of the program, to be sure. As improbable as it might sound, two Christmasy numbers for chorus and orchestra written by John Williams for the movies “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2” were fun to hear--honest, unaffected, entertaining.

A setting of the Gloria from the traditional Latin Mass by Randol Alan Bass had a grand energy about it as well. And the star boy soprano of the Pacific Chorale Children’s Chorus, Nicholas Boragno, again distinguished himself with a crystalline tone and engaging musicality in John Rutter’s “There Is a Flower.”

As for the rest of it, this was essentially a Christmas pops concert, with cheesy arrangements of carols and the dreaded “Sleigh Ride,” by Leroy Anderson, loved only by trumpet players because they get to make a whinnying noise with their instruments.

In the end, the lesson may be that if you want to have a Christmas pops concert, put Christmas music on the program and be done with it. Please, hold the sitars.