Souls in a highly vocal transmigration

John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which was given its West Coast premiere Sunday night by the Pacific Chorale at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is music meant to stay out of a listener’s way.

Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, the score is, in the most solemn and profoundly affecting sense, what Erik Satie once described as “furniture music.” It creates an environment but doesn’t push your emotions around the way a requiem Mass might. Adams’ desire was to use sound to transform the concert hall into a “memory space,” a kind of aural cathedral in which listeners can be both in communion and alone with their thoughts.

Such a transformation is actually a tremendously involved musical construction job. “Transmigration” utilizes a vast orchestra, full chorus, children’s chorus, recorded street sounds and a litany of victims’ names, all disposed through an extensive and complex electronic surround sound system. Though mostly quiet and undramatic, it was written to take full advantage of a great orchestra and its virtuoso music director, Lorin Maazel.

For Sunday’s performance, which was the culminating work in a program of memorial music from the last decade by California composers, John Alexander, the music director of the Pacific Chorale, had the services of the Pacific Symphony and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. The work won a Pulitzer Prize this year, but the original sound design by Mark Grey was not fully functional at the New York premiere, so this was also an opportunity to finally hear the score as the composer wished.

As was the case in Avery Fisher Hall at the premiere, the loudspeakers throughout Segerstrom Hall became like cathedral windows opened to the New York street, with sirens and footfalls welcomed in. Grey’s sound design vividly spreads the orchestra and chorus throughout the hall as well. Adams further enhances the spatial effects with an offstage trumpet that alludes to Ives’ “The Unanswered Question.”

Near the end of the work, six violins, tuned a quarter-tone higher than the other instruments, add what feels like a sonic fourth dimension, the sound of transmigration.

The forward motion may be minimal, but the orchestra is very busy in its subdued way, as are the two choruses. Rhythms are irregular, instrumental balances particularly delicate. When a climax is reached, it comes as a shocking burst of blaring orchestra and a choral chant of “light, light, light,” reminiscent of the recent video work by Bill Viola in which his own version of a transmigrating soul suddenly resurrects from a serene ocean.

At the premiere, this climax felt like a sensational release of pent-up emotion. Sunday it was more crudely arrived at, and a good reminder of just how tricky it is to control all the elements in this intricate score. Could it be that by programming it, Alexander was simply trying to capitalize on the presence of Adams this week in Los Angeles, where his new work, “The Dharma at Big Sur,” was commissioned for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall?

Certainly, the performance felt like attempted stolen thunder. The Pacific Chorale is a powerhouse of a chorus. It articulates word and pitch alike with splendid clarity. But its sound is more that of a singers’ corporation -- sopranos, altos, tenors and basses as different divisions competing to show a profit -- than a unified body.

In “Transmigration,” Alexander punched out choral sound vividly, often overwhelming the orchestra. There was little hope for a listener to have a moment with his thoughts, Adams’ “memory space” being turned into Alexander’s “you’d-better-not-forget-or-else space.”

Two works by composers at USC opened the program. Morton Lauridsen’s gentle, disarming “Lux Aeterna,” written for the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 1997, has been a huge hit, making Lauridsen the most widely performed American choral composer. Alexander’s assertive performance of this sweet-tempered requiem was affective in its stentorian way but without affection.

James Hopkins’ “Songs of Eternity,” to texts about death and acceptance by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, was commissioned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Pacific Chorale in 1993. Its colorful, theatrical style is congenial to the chorus’ strengths, although here, too, Alexander aggressively favored chorus over orchestra.