Choral Group’s Voice Continues to Resonate

Twenty-five years ago this month, James Stemen led a fledgling choral group in Handel’s venerable “Messiah.”

On Sunday, he’ll lead the group, now the Los Robles Master Chorale, as it celebrates its silver anniversary with the same piece. And in May, the group that started with some good intentions and a few good voices will play Carnegie Hall.

Sitting in a conference room at Moorpark College before an evening rehearsal, Stemen shook his head. “I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. It doesn’t feel like it.”

The Los Robles saga began with Stemen’s desire to tap the community’s talent pool. “I have always wanted to have some kind of a better choral group than I could get with my daytime college-age students,” said Stemen, a professor at Moorpark since 1969.

First named the Oratorio Chorus, it became the Moorpark Masterworks Chorale before its present incarnation. The change reflects the larger geographical spread of its participants and its audience, Stemen said.

For the silver-anniversary season, the group is stretching its ambitions. Last month, the chorale performed -- to standing-room only crowds -- a reprise of Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” which it had presented in a fully staged version in 1994. In the spring, it will perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, along with the Ventura County Master Chorale, at the invitation of the New West Symphony.

The crowning event of the season will be on May 31, when Los Robles joins other choral groups from around the country to perform “Carmina Burana” at Carnegie Hall.

Stemen’s concern is raising enough money to bring a large group of singers to New York. The group has 70 to 90 members at any one time.

In addition to the evening concert there, the group has been asked to perform a 25-minute solo set that afternoon. Stemen hopes to showcase music by the group’s assistant director, Wilbur Skeels, and another local composer.

“West meets East,” Stemen said. “That’s what I’d like to do.”

Heading a group like the chorale means juggling creative responsibilities and economic obligations.

Income from grants, ticket sales, display ads in programs and other fund-raising goes toward bills, including hiring “good pickup orchestras,” to the tune of $17,000 a night, venue rentals -- which can be $5,000 for the Kavli Theater in Thousand Oaks -- and other support costs.

For the singers, though, it’s a labor of love.

“Our mission is to perform these great choral works for the community and to try to be cost-effective when we do it,” Stemen said. “Right now, we are really struggling to meet the bills for this season.”

Stemen grew up in Goshen, Ind. After studying music at Goshen College, he earned his master’s degree at Southern Methodist University in Texas, where he worked with noted choral director Lloyd Fautsch.

Two years after Moorpark College opened, he took a teaching job there. Now divorced, Stemen has two grown children.

Although “people have asked me about retiring, I’m not ready to,” the 66-year-old Stemen said. “I still have some choral works which I haven’t performed and would like to. I don’t know what I’d do if I retired, anyway.”

Skeels has been Stemen’s right-hand man for many years.

“[Stemen] is committed to working for a beautiful choral sound,” Skeels said. “It is a never-ending and somewhat thankless task to school volunteers in the art of good voice production. But he keeps at it.”

Edith Snyder, who has been a Los Robles singer since 1991, said Stemen “works hard at giving his group a variety of experiences and new challenges,” including several European tours.

Starting as a singer, Skeels later became the group’s accompanist, assistant director and resident composer. By day, he is pastor of the First Baptist Church in Ojai and has started a choral publishing company, Cantus Quercus Press.

On this weekend’s program, the Handel centerpiece will be complemented by several short works by German composer Franz Biebl, who died at age 95 in 2001. Stemen, Skeels and the choir members had met Biebl during a concert in Germany.

Los Robles has developed other strong ties in the choral world. Roger Wagner, whose work with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Roger Wagner Chorale helped popularize choral music, conducted Stemen’s group shortly before his death in 1992.

Other guest conductors have included Britain’s Sir David Willcocks, former L.A. Master Chorale director Paul Salamunovich and San Francisco Symphony Choral’s Vance George.

Los Robles fits into a larger choral scene in Southern California. It is one of two important choral groups in Ventura County, along with the Ventura County Master Chorale. To the north, there is the Santa Barbara Chorale Society, and to the south, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the younger Pacific Chorale in Orange County are professional standard bearers.

That’s professional, as in paid. Which is not the case here.

“Ninety-eight percent of my people come to sing for the love of it,” Stemen said.

“When an audience sits there and hears a professional group sing, they think, ‘I know why they’re good. They’re paid,’ ” he said. “But when they sit and hear us ... they just judge us by how well we sing.”

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FYI: Los Robles Master Chorale will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Moorpark College Performing Arts Center, 7075 Campus Road. Tickets are $18 for adults and $6 for children under 12. For information, call 497-0386.