Master Chorale strikes notes about war

The Los Angeles Master Chorale concert Sunday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall began with “God, Protect Us From War,” by Veljo Tormis, an Estonian composer. It ended with Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War.”

In between came the premiere of Louis Andriessen’s brilliantly disquieting “The City of Dis,” the abysmal burning metropolis of the dead in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Here reside those who commit violence aimed at “God, oneself, or at one’s neighbor,” and no one stands guard against atrocities.

Arts organizations in America are, of course, mindful of taking political positions, and the Master Chorale concert did not suggest a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq or anything like that. But the program did assert that art has something to say about the circumstance of war to those who witness it, whether up close or from the comfort of home.

Tormis’ five-minute opener, written in 1984, is for a small male chorus singing a fraught Finnish text that seeks God’s shelter from the “mouth of the gun” and “the ground of manslaughter.” The effect is of Gregorian and Tibetan monks joining voice in deep, dark chant written in an ancient, universal language of pain.

Haydn’s mass is also known as “Paukenmesse,” after the German word for timpani, and the drums give it a military flavor. But so much of the score is thrilling music that it rarely serves as a mass for the victims of war, and is more typically used as a mass in spite of war or in protest of war.

In between these meditations came the real, teeming world in all its horror and glory. Despite a certain resemblance to the worst scenes from Baghdad, Andriessen’s Dis is a universal city. And this most urban of composers celebrates sex in the city and compassion, while acknowledging death and destruction.

The 21-minute score -- which the Master Chorale commissioned and its music director, Grant Gershon, conducted -- will stand as the opening section of Andriessen’s new opera, “La Commedia.” A collaboration with the American filmmaker Hal Hartley, the full opera (the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed an excerpt during its 2006 “Minimalist Jukebox” festival) will have its premiere next June in Amsterdam in a building appropriate for the circus.

Andriessen is as deadly serious a composer as any I know, but he also has a fully developed sense of irony and wondrous appreciation of, and perhaps fondness for, folly. The full title of his new work is “City of Dis or: The Ship of Fools,” the latter text coming from a 15th century German source that Andriessen likens to a metaphor for life -- namely, we sail through existence doing business, getting drunk, muddling though.

His musical style takes something from Minimalism, from Stravinsky and from jazz, but the bright, brazen sound is unmistakably his. The small chorus is miked and asked to sing with a flat tone, no vibrato to create something like that produced in a pop recording studio.

The concert was a collaboration with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, but Andriessen’s instrumental forces -- brass, woodwind and percussion heavy, are always eccentric. Here he permitted a few strings but, please, no violas. Also no bassoons.

Instrumental combinations proved breathtaking. A solo viola, solo alto and guitar, in a kind of Stravinskyan bebop, announce “a thousand angels fallen from heaven.” A contrabass clarinet and electric bass guitar together are “turbid waves.” Clattering metal are Messiaen taken to a new dimension. The storm at the end wickedly rattles a listener’s bones.

Even so, Andriessen does not deny himself a good time. He begins with recorded sounds of Amsterdam -- a soundscape by a young Dutch composer, Anke Brouwer. Honking sirens give the tempo. The first notes in strings and winds come from Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” transformed into driving rhythms, so to speak. Beatrice (Deborah Mayhan) and Dante (Scott Graff), sung from within the chorus, are the voices of bliss and queasiness.

Gershon led a strongly etched performance, despite the problems created by trying to mike a chorus. Jeffrey Kahane, the orchestra’s music director, conducted Haydn’s mass with a wonderful sense of verve, but he too suffered balance problems (the timpani lacked presence).

The soloists (Tamara Bevard, Farah Kidwai, Daniel Chaney and Stephen Grimm) were chorus members who struggled as if solo voices in the desert. But perhaps serving as a metaphor for protest, they made an effective collective quartet at the end in the Benedictus and Agnus Dei.

mark.swed@latimes.com