L.A. Master Chorale Shines in Complex Concert

Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale surmounted musical challenges far more easily than the metaphysical ones they posed Saturday at First United Methodist Church in Pasadena.

In only the second concert--and the first off-campus--led by the new music director, the chorale sounded honed, fresh, blended and pitch-accurate throughout a difficult, brutally exposed six-part a cappella program.

The singers and conductor are still getting to know each other, however. They didn’t always respond to the intricacies of his phrasing in Josquin’s “Missa de Beata Virgine.” One wondered if his subdividing the beat so often here also was necessary.

More importantly, his idea of embedding Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna between the Gloria and the Sanctus revealed an arresting concept.

Ligeti, too, begins with a focused purity that expands through seemingly all vocal possibilities. The return to Josquin sounded metaphorically as if one tiny portion of such heavenly influence became embodied in a way that was humanly understandable.

But a similar seamless passing from James MacMillan’s “Cantos Sagrados” (Sacred Songs) to Messiaen’s “O Sacrum Convivium” didn’t work anywhere near as well.

MacMillan’s powerful setting of three even more powerful political plus religious poems (texts by Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza) raises complex issues that cannot be resolved musically, even metaphorically. These deal with the complicity of the church in the conquest of the New World and the fate of the “disappeared” in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

Messiaen’s image of a sacred banquet honoring Christ seems--except to the devout--a feeble, imaginary resolution to such pain and brutality.

Timothy Howard was the organist in the MacMillan and Messiaen works. Music by Brahms and Ginastera completed the program.