When voices unite

“I’ve seen whole choirs waltz through the door.” Jean Severson’s pleasant alto rises toward a laugh. “Quartets come in, sit two in front, two in back. There are herds of sopranos. Then there’s a group of people waiting for the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus. It’s the only thing they know.”

Severson is only getting warmed up as she runs through her take on a longtime tradition in supposedly traditionless Los Angeles: the annual “Messiah” sing-along, which for 22 years has predictably filled two-thirds of the 3,000 seats at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with people who love to add their voices to Handel’s famous oratorio -- or, at least, parts of it.

“You get people who get up, sing a measure, then you don’t hear them for a page,” she says, “then they chime in a page later. There are no expectations. There’s no pressure. People are hanging from the rafters. It’s unbelievable.”

Severson, who is the concert manager of the Pasadena Symphony, has been participating in the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s bring-your-own-score “Messiah” on and off since 1986. She trained as a singer and appeared in community theater before shifting gears to work in orchestra administration.

“Once a year or so,” she said, “I dust off my choral skills and take them down to the Music Center. Basically, it’s a free-for-all. You come, you elbow your way in to a seat: OK, go.”

Well, not exactly. The free-for-all has a conductor. This year’s edition, which takes place Monday, will be led by the Master Chorale’s music director, Grant Gershon, whose job it is to keep the cues coming and the mass effort out in the hall moving along with the orchestra and the soloists on stage.

“The person who suffers the most is the conductor,” Severson says. “Because it’s hideous. Some professionals come, who know everything. But eventually every chorus gets slower and slower. His poor arms! Thank God for the soloists. They give the maestro a moment of peace.”

This will be Gershon’s first go-round at the head of a public “Messiah.” Last year, Martin Neary conducted and Gershon headed for the audience seats and sang along for himself.

“I’m kind of chirping away, then I hear this wonderful voice next to me,” Severson said. “It’s Grant Gershon. It was the most humiliating experience in my life.”

Gershon, who took charge of the chorale last year, participated “kind of on a whim,” he says.

“Certainly I had some professional curiosity about it as well. I had never been to one before. I brought my score, planted myself among the civilian population and I had a great time.

“It was really fascinating. Some people seemed to be there just to listen and enjoy. Some people were really putting on a performance. It really ran the gamut.”

Gershon isn’t under any illusions about the musical values of the performance, however.

“Obviously, any sing-along ‘Messiah’ is not going to have the polish of a rehearsed performance,” he said. “But it does have a remarkable spirit of community to it.”

A star in the East

What is a two-decade tradition in L.A. is half-again as old on the East Coast.

The New York City-based National Choral Council claims to have invented the idea with its “Messiah Sing-In” at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1968.

“We created the name ‘Messiah Sing-In’ during a period when there were sing-ins and love-ins,” said the council’s music director, Martin Josman. “New York had long had a profile as being a very strong instrumental and opera town. Those of us in the choral fraternity were eager to create an event that made choral music important for the whole community at least one night of the year.

“Since it was to be a community venture, rather than the glorification of any one organization or one conductor, we decided there would be no chorus on stage, that the audience would be the sole singing group, and that we would have a team of conductors, 17 or 18, each one conducting one of the choruses.”

The National Choral Council will offer its 34th annual “Messiah Sing-In” on Wednesday in Avery Fisher Hall. A “Messiah” sing-along also has been held annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., since 1971. The Master Chorale is confident that its founder and leader from 1964 to 1984, Roger Wagner, began the tradition in Los Angeles in 1980; it may have been the first one on the West Coast as well.

In the debut version in 1968, the choral council tried to do all 53 arias and choruses in the standard edition of the oratorio, published by Schirmer. That performance lengthened what is usually a 2 1/2-hour piece to four hours and 20 minutes. Since then, every “Messiah” sing-along takes cuts.

But then, so do most rehearsed performances. For starters, there is no single authentic version of the work. From the first performances (in Dublin in 1742, and in London in 1743, which is where George II began the tradition of standing for the “Hallelujah” Chorus), Handel made changes in every performance he led during his lifetime. British music theorist and editor Ebenezer Prout compiled a representative and highly influential edition in 1902, though scholars say even that score didn’t reflect any single Handel-led performance.

Editors have been tinkering ever since. But most sing-alongs as well as many modern performances rely on the 252-page Schirmer edition, which will be on sale in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion tomorrow for newcomers who don’t have a copy. Gershon will announce from the stage which parts will be sung and which will be skipped.

“We’ll do more of the score than you might think,” he said. “Essentially the entire first part, probably about one-third of the second part and probably about half of the third part.”

Preparing for the performance

After finding herself seated next to Gershon’s “perfect tenor voice” last year, Severson said this year she plans to do at least a little prep work for the big day.

“To avoid utter humiliation,” she said, “I’ll go over the choruses.”

Another alto, Missy Alpern, one of a group of about 10 Beverly Hills High School alums who have been attending on and off since the mid-’80s, agreed that some practice pays off.

“Our group doesn’t rehearse as a group,” she said. “We’ve sung the ‘Messiah’ so many times in school and on so many occasions. But that doesn’t mean we don’t practice individually.”

Baritone George Kohn, a mortgage banker by day, jazz pianist by night and singer on weekends, is one of the newcomers. He’s not doing much to prepare, he said.

“I’ll listen to the recording,” he said. “I have a score. I’ve heard from others that there are a lot of good singers who show up. I’m a good sight reader. But I’m pretty much assuming I’ll be carried.”

Alpern, who credits her love of choral singing to a high school chorus teacher, claims that part of the fun is the challenge of retrieving rusty skills on the spot.

“It’s like a pickup basketball game. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. You find you’ve turned two pages instead of one and ... ‘I don’t know where I am!’ ”

“It’s just a fun experience of being together,” Alpern said. “The way the world is today, I could spend my whole life not physically interacting with anyone. This has to be done the old-fashioned way. There’s no new technology for choral singing. You have to be there. You have to have the music.”

Besides, she says, there is the exhilaration of participating, even in a small way, in the choral big time: “This is our way -- those of us who will never get to sing with the Master Chorale -- of singing with the Master Chorale. It’s a chance to get as close to greatness as possible.”

Gershon isn’t exactly prepared for greatness, but he is prepared for fun.

“In a perverse way,” he says, “I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a new experience. The orchestra is quite good. There are terrific soloists. I’m a person who enjoys spontaneity in performance. What could be more spontaneous than having no rehearsals?”

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‘Messiah’ sing-along

Who: Los Angeles Master Chorale and all comers

When: Monday, 8 p.m.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

Price: $15 to $35

Contact: (213) 365-3500