Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

While I was out of town in Ojai, correspondent and man about time Ben Vanaman caught the concluding performance of the Los Angeles Master Chorale season and filed this report.

Henryk Górecki was the featured composer of the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s final concert of the 2011-2012 season. The program featured three a cappella pieces –Lobgesang, Five Marian Songs, and Miserere- each sharing the composer’s noted compositional style marked by dense yet delicate homophonic sonorities in building repetition. These works, like the composer’s famous Symphony No. 3, are haunting and elegiac. Their texts are devotional, but the sorrowful music evokes a lament for man’s suffering, no doubt a reflection of the composer’s hardscrabble upbringing in a repressive political environment. This undercurrent was most pointedly evident in Miserere which was composed as a protest against the Polish government’s crackdown against the “Solidarity” social movement of the 1980s when the piece was composed.

For the program’s first half, Lobgesang and Five Marian Songs, were paired with Brahms’ Psalm setting Schaffe in mir, Gott, en rein Herz sandwiched in between. Music Director Grant Gershon upended the usual configuration or choristers, placing the singers instead, male and female in all voice groups, amongst each other, creating an extraordinary blended sound. This arrangement was particularly effective in the motet-like Lobgesang (“Song of Praise”), which was commissioned by the city of Mainz in 2000 to celebrate the sixth hundred anniversary of its honored son Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The composer’s text, a psalm of praise to God, is certainly a tribute to Gutenberg’s role in bringing the Bible more vividly to life. It’s a robust work, still infused with melancholy or solemnity: man’s humility against the divine.

The Five Marian Songs are musical gems, soon to be recorded by the LAMC for the first time, along with Lobgesang and the already-recorded Miserere, for the Decca label for a fall release. And if this concert performance was any indication, it will be a must own recording. Each of the five songs –all odes to the Virgin Mary- has a unique character while embodying the composer’s iconic sound. The first, “Mother of the Heavenly Lord,” is lilting and looping and spry, suggestive of a folk song, such tunes bearing an imprint on Górecki’s work from when he heard them as a child. The entrancing third song, “Hail Mary,” is almost a lullaby. The fourth, “Oh! How sad it is to part,” paradoxically ends on a note of major-key uplift as the chorus intones, “we wish to serve you always in this life and forever after.” The fifth song, “We shall sing your praises forever and ever,” continues in this spirit of jubilation. However, it is the dolorous second song, “Most Holy Mother,” that lingers, a beseeching cry for God’s mercy that gathers force through the iteratively downward trajectory of the musical lines.

The entire second part of the program was devoted to the eight-part Miserere, an epic appeal for God’s same mercy, here in the face of man’s inhumanity, that became the program’s emotional bookend to “Most Holy Mother.” The music, which evokes the first movement of the Third Symphony in its unrelenting and inexorable crescendo, grows from the ground up, basses providing the foundation for the entrance of the tenor and then alto and soprano voices. The chorus intones “Lord our God” over and over until the very end, when the piece ends with a whisper: “miserere nobis (have mercy on us).” It was a sublime moment, and the chorale has rarely sounded better, perhaps a reflection of the group’s commitment to their upcoming recording of this material. The more conventional harmonic structure of the Brahms piece was an effective contrast, yet both composers share an affinity for dense, dark musical textures. Conductor Gershon jokingly referred to the Brahms piece as a “cheese course,” if it’s a bit difficult to think of Brahms’ music as a palette cleanser.

Labels: LA Master Chorale 11/12