Master Chorale Attempts a Tough Handel Work

Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” presents problems that not even the Los Angeles Master Chorale at its most glorious, as it was Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, could wholly solve.

Annette Landgraf’s reconstruction of the missing Part 1 (“The Lamentations of the Israelites for the Death of Joseph”) in 1999 for the ongoing Halle Handel Edition has challenged all subsequent performances. We can no longer consider this a work in two parts, as it was presented here. We’ve gotten used to such performances, which start so abruptly and which may throw off the proper balance between grief and triumph, but we at least need to acknowledge the issue. The program notes didn’t.

More intrinsic problems include the dominance of choruses over solos and duets and the text, taken from Exodus, which heaps destruction upon the innocent as well as the guilty. In the notes, music director Grant Gershon acknowledged his discomfort with this particular issue but argued the work’s compensatory compassion for humanity as well as simply facing its contradictions.

Still, what do you do with “The Lord is a man of war”? Here, solo basses Jinyoung Jang and Lewis Landau struck deliberately self-satisfied poses before, incidentally, singing the duet spiritedly. But Handel’s music isn’t fatuous, and the same sentiment rings throughout the text. You can’t disavow it with these kinds of tactics.

At full 111-voice throttle, the chorale made a rich, stupendous sound. “He gave them hailstones” was sung with crackerjack virtuosity, and “The Lord shall reign” and “Sing ye to the Lord” were among the choruses that gave visceral thrills. But the pedal-to-the-metal approach proved wearying too. Gershon’s dynamic options with a chorale of the size proved limited, as were efforts at text painting.

Except in the scaled-down accompaniment for the soloists, the orchestra’s richly varied contributions could often be missed.

Of the other soloists, countertenor Steven Rickards sang with sweet agility, Jonathan Mack with a forthright if pale tenor and Tania Batson with a somewhat small soprano. Holly Shaw Price confidently joined Batson in the soprano duet “The Lord is my strength.”