Gershon and Master Chorale Work From a New Score

September is the month when the new performing arts season begins, and in music it has been a month of change around America. New music directors have begun at the Atlanta Symphony (Robert Spano), the Cincinnati Orchestra (Paavo Jrvi), the Houston Symphony (Hans Graf) and the Long Beach Symphony (Enrique Arturo Diemecke). At Los Angeles Opera, Kent Nagano, in his first outing as principal conductor, showed what a difference he can make.

All will certainly bring something different, and presumably fresh, to their institutions. But none has gone as far as Grant Gershon in putting into practice a radical new vision. Gershon conducted his first program as new music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale on Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On the most immediate level, it was a concert of marvelous music, marvelously sung, for which the audience responded with warm enthusiasm.

But on another level it was a statement. The Master Chorale, which was founded in 1962 by Roger Wagner, has always had a loyal audience for programs that mixed standard choral repertory with popular and family fare. In recent years, the former music director, Paul Salamunovich (now music director emeritus) eased his audiences into their own time with well chosen, immediately accessible modern music, particularly the stunningly beautiful works of Morton Lauridsen. But even so, a visit to the Master Chorale often felt like entering a time warp.

That will not be the case with Gershon, who has an eager interest in, and often a personal working relationship with, a wide variety of living composers, from Gyorgy Ligeti to John Adams. Saturday’s concert closed with a large-scale work for chorus and orchestra by Philip Glass, “Itaipu.” The very name of Glass on a Master Chorale program might be expected to shock the chorus’ typical subscribers. But if there was any shock, beyond one or two people I saw leave during the performance, it was the surprise of discovery revealed by a rapt, standing ovation.

“Itaipu” is a 35-minute work written in 1988 and inspired by the construction of the world’s largest hydroelectric plant in Brazil. It uses a creation text drawn from the creation myth of Guarani Indians, who were displaced by the project. It has an epic style, grim and exciting, conveying the great and often ambiguous conflicts between technology and humanity. It is a big subject, and one we are fervently considering in the wake of Sept. 11, as we try to gauge the constructive and destructive potentials of technology.

What made the performance so impressive Saturday, however, was a larger context in which it was placed. Despite its trite title, “Masterworks of Humanity” (not everything has changed with the Master Chorale), the program was an unhackneyed exercise in using music as a force for expansive expression.

It set the mood with Thomas Tallis’ motet from the 16th century, “Spem in Alium,” in which there are 40 independent, intertwining contrapuntal lines, creating the effect of looming Gothic architecture in sound. The chorus was divided between the stage and two sides of the Founder’s Circle, engulfing the audience. Next was Bruckner’s Te Deum, the greatest choral piece by the most expansive and devout symphonist of the 19th century. “Itaipu” sounded like the next step, its chugging repetitions and its grandeur a continuation with new means of the tradition that Renaissance contrapuntalists and Bruckner fostered.

It was, on Gershon’s part, a brilliant idea to thus bring the audience along with him into something new. But what made the evening so engaging was the sheer sense of singers taking risks, and the evident delight the new music director took in guiding them to safety. Gershon is a direct, unfussy conductor, who values clarity, clean execution and immediate statements. There was no interpretive grandstanding; there was a wealth of sincere, musician-friendly support.

It was also a challenge for the Master Chorale Orchestra. Under previous music directors, instrumentalists have always seemed of secondary importance to singers. The orchestral playing Saturday was still not on the gripping level of the Master Chorale’s singing, but its improvement over previous seasons was appreciable. In the spectacular opening of the Bruckner and in the third movement of the Glass, the orchestra demonstrated that these musicians, too, had caught the spirit of the evening.

Gershon remembered the victims of terrorism with Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” ethereally sung, and he left us with his own lovely arrangement of “America the Beautiful” for chorus, a heartfelt harmonization he announced he made just the other day. He left us with something else, as well--the sense that music can move forward. This will be an ensemble to watch.