Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

It was a busy Sunday evening. The Los Angeles Master Chorale performed their final show of the season this weekend, and, though it was an a cappella performance with the full chorale, it was packed with activity. Not to mention some incredibly beautiful music. The variety of selections on the program was no surprise – diversity has always been a staple of the LAMC’s repertory. The evening careened from Allegri’s 17th Century Miserere to an arrangement of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. But the real news of the night was all the comings and goings for the ensemble. While Artistic Director Grant Gershon remains at the helm, Sunday marked the end of Associate Conductor Leslie Leighton’s six-year tenure with the ensemble. She choked back tears as she paid tribute to her musical family and then she led them in a thoughtful performance of the late Steven Stucky’s Three New Motets.

This lovely so-long was followed by a hotly anticipated hello in the form of the newly appointed inaugural LAMC Swan Family Artist-in-Residence, Eric Whitacre. Whitacre has cultivated a choir geek rock star persona that at times has cleverly masked his immense talent as a composer and conductor. He led two pieces after the intermission in the evening’s program that said much about what he may bring to the LAMC in coming seasons. First was that arrangement of Depeche Mode’s 1990 hit Enjoy the Silence. He explained the choice as a tribute to his love of pop music from his adolescence and certainly paid tribute to the geek in many of his audience. But the arrangement was much more than a gimmick. His arrangement was skillful and haunting in a way that sincerely added to the source material. Following this was Anders Hillborg’s Mouyayoum, a wordless percolating postmodern piece with dozens and dozens of parts melding in an elaborate aural tapestry. Whitacre has many tricks up his sleeve, and it’s as much an exciting time to be listening to the Chorale now as it ever has been. And if one needed further evidence of that, there wasn’t any need to look any further than the sparse glow of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. Gershon and his vocalists know how to fill a room with spirit and they did so over and over again at the end of the season.

Labels: LA Master Chorale 15/16

The years just get bigger and bigger for New York’s Bang on a Can collective. Never wanting for recognition, both the composers who founded the group and the magnificent All-Stars, the musicians who make up the group’s performance ensemble have been grabbing larger headlines in recent months even by their prior standards. David Lang popped up behind Chris Rock on this year’s Oscar telecast following his nomination for Best Song from Paolo Sorrentino’s film, Youth. (Though he was denied the common courtesy of having his work performed during the telecast.) Meanwhile his fellow colleague Julia Wolfe has been on a tear of her own recently winning last year’s Pulitzer Prize for music. It was a big and well deserved win for a “downtown” artist (in the parlance of Kyle Gann) and a rare acknowledgment by the judges of compositions by women (she is only the 6th woman to win in the Pulitzer’s history). The prize winning work, Anthracite Fields, received its West Coast premiere Sunday night with the assistance of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, their Artistic Director, Grant Gershon, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. It was a stunner and probably the best single performance the Walt Disney Concert Hall has hosted this season. And after a weekend full of Gustavo Dudamel’s bloated, ponderous Mahler with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Wolfe and her collaborators provided a much needed aesthetic antidote on just about every level.

Anthracite Fields is an hour long oratorio about coal mining in Eastern Pennsylvania, a region very near where Wolfe herself grew up. It functions on some levels as an oral history of laborers working in these mines and can swing between elegy and a call for social and economic justice. But before diving into Wolfe’s grand choral work on Sunday, the Chorale presented a number of American folk songs from the Sacred Harp collection. More often associated with a raw sound or edge when performed in a more typical community setting, these folk songs were beautifully performed with a restraint lent by the polish of a professional ensemble. It was a smart introduction for what followed, though, in that while Anthracite Fields concerns the lives of coal miners, Wolfe did not tied the piece musically to elements of traditional folk music of the Appalachian region. Instead Wolfe uses a more contemporary language and sound inspired more by late 20th-century minimalism and rock’n’roll. Anthracite Fields unfolds over five movements starting with Foundations, which opens with low rumbling invoking a journey into the depth of the earth. This is soon replaced by the repeated names of injured coal miners, all starting with John followed by monosyllabic surnames, which provides a back drop to imagery of the formation of coal in the earth and what the miners endured to pull it out of the ground. The focus of the work pulls back over subsequent movements, including passages that set the words of labor leader John Lewis, and later builds on a couplet from early 20th-century advertisements for coal-powered trains. The piece concludes with a masterful movement called Appliances. Here the names of injured miners have been replaced with daily living functions we all participate in from turning on lights to calling a friend. All of these activities consume the power these miners have suffered for through their labor. And the final image above this sonic backdrop is of the imagined New York socialite Phoebe Snow traveling by train in the ads of a locomotive company from over a century ago. She arrives with her white dress pristine and unblemished thanks to traveling under the power of coal. This deft and insightful imagery packs a punch and it highlights Wolfe’s ability to deliver a huge amount of material with relatively minimal words.

In just over an hour, the Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars had taken us out of the ground but we were no longer able to clean the metaphorical coal dust from our own hands. The performance was accompanied with video projections designed by Jeff Sugg consisting mainly of photographs and animation of coal miners and their work environment from the early to mid- 20th century. It worked well without overwhelming the content of the musical performance. The Chorale masterfully wound around the many turns in the score from the soft moaning and whispers that laid the ground work of each movement to the raucous and rhythmic passages when the power of motion of the energy produced in this particularly American history of labor was in full operation.

It was a great night for the Chorale overall and it continued their great work with the Bang on a Can artists. Next up in the collaboration will be the release next year of the Chorale's first recording for Cantaloupe Music featuring David Lang's the national anthems and his own Pulitzer winning the little match girl passion.

Labels: LA Master Chorale 15/16

It was a weekend of big gestures and major staples this weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall. While Esa-Pekka Salonen was reminding everyone of what the Los Angeles Philharmonic has been missing for a long time with some clear-headed adult-sounding Mahler, the Los Angeles Master Chorale was doing what they do best delivering a varied and powerful version of Verdi’s Requiem. The piece is a perennial favorite; omnipresent despite the large resources that go into its performance. Opera companies and symphonies trot out this choral masterwork for anniversaries, memorial services and sometimes for absolutely no notable occasion whatsoever. But who needs an excuse with music that so magnificently straddles the world of the sacred and the more profane theatrical realm of opera. It’s a flexible piece with tons of interpretive space within its sturdy frame for conductors to run within, taking off in any number of directions. LAMC Music Director Grant Gershon did just that, having it all with this past weekend’s performances. At times the piece sounded appealingly ecclesiastical. The opening Kyrie was so reverent that the performance seemed out of place outside of a church. But while Gershon milked the stately mass version of the piece, this wasn’t a one note performance. He and the chorale would later turn to the more theatrical and often cited operatic overtones of the piece giving a performance that was equal parts sacred and profane.

It was always thrilling, of course. But the show benefited from some superb soloists who represented a mix of veterans and some very inspiring newcomers. The much loved mezzo Michelle DeYoung joined bass Morris Robinson as the more experienced members of the team and neither disappointed. Soprano Amber Wagner, who has been making a name for herself in high profile Wagner and Strauss parts in Chicago in recent seasons, soared above the assembled forces with real grace and power. But the biggest discovery for me was tenor Issachac Savage. He was unnervingly good – warm, easy and unforced with plenty of power. Easily the most exciting American tenor I’ve heard in years. More of him please, right away. It’s always nice to start the year on a high point and the Los Angeles Master Chorale did just that.

Labels: LA Master Chorale 15/16