Chorale opts for solemnity

Grant Gershon, the personable, boyish, enterprising music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, doesn’t follow a predictable line.

It would have been tempting and entirely natural for him and the chorale to break in Walt Disney Concert Hall’s new pipe organ with music that would spotlight as many of the instrument’s sounds and tricks as they could get away with. Yet rather than pull out all of the stops, as it were, Gershon chose a relatively solemn, often lyrical program of religious works Sunday night -- albeit with a contemporary slant in the evening’s second half.

As heard in the original version for organ and choir, Dvorak’s Mass in D Major came off as an intimate yet conventional 19th century Central European service, bearing hardly any audible national marks.

Elements of doubt and contrast crept forth in two highly absorbing, related works by Scotland’s James MacMillan: “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis,” both West Coast premieres. As the chorus soared lyrically, the organ delivered disturbing, dissonant slams, eerie sustained passages or Messiaen-like filigrees in response.

Finally, there was radiant reassurance -- as well as a fond nod to the era of Gershon’s predecessor, Paul Salamunovich -- in Morten Lauridsen’s lovable “Lux Aeterna,” where the missing warmth of an orchestra was compensated for by the solid bass underpinnings of the organ’s pedals.

Gershon led this last piece slowly, curvaceously; the Master Chorale sang ecstatically. Throughout the evening, one could savor the way the ensemble’s voices blended in clearly focused, three-dimensional detail with whatever the organ was pumping out.

Since Disney Hall doesn’t have the long reverberation time of a cathedral, you didn’t get the all-enveloping, ethereal experience of the latter kind of space. What you did get was clarity and an almost tactile immediacy that might be more suited for contemporary works than some older choral/organ repertoire.

Sunday’s concert featured a parade of three noted local organists. James Walker of Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church was the man at the manuals in the Dvorak, while the First Congregational Church’s David Goode took over in the MacMillan pieces and the St. James Church’s James Buonemani finished in the Lauridsen.

Goode also performed an unbilled solo, “Litanies” by Jehan Alain (killed in World War II at age 29). It proved a fascinating, fragmented, breathlessly shifting blast from a young composer impatiently sowing his wild oats.