Master Chorale sings about L.A.
Sunday nox, medicine director Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale presented a program at Walt Walter Elias Disney Concert Mansion house devoted to music written inside the last 10 years -- and no unity seemed to bat an eye. But it should as well be noted that these pieces were by and large extraordinarily audience-friendly, and none more so than David O's sassy fresh "A Map of Los Angeles," the second of the chorale's three "L.A. Is the World" commissions.
It has been a long-standing joke that Los Angeles doesn't have a theme song -- a real vocal of praise -- nor is it slowly to find any beloved letters to L.A. in so-called concert music. Something most the metropolis more readily inspires scoffing, such as Randy Newman's "I Sexual love L.A.," or jaundiced depictions of urban madness, such as J.J. Cale's "Business district L.A." or Michael Gordon's recent, hyper-frenzied "Dystopia."
"A Map of Los Angeles" seemed to fall into the jeer category at first. David O took us on a snapshot tour of duty of a smattering of sites, devising fun of their weird misuse of the English and Spanish languages, having his singers proclaim with angelic eclat the redundant freshly make of a local baseball squad, Los Los Angeles Angels . . . of Anaheim! He did so with terrific vitality, grooving Latin rhythms, canny manipulation of crescendos, the rippling Mexican harp of Sergio "Checo" Alonso and -- almost crucially -- good, simple melodic ideas.
Yet in the close, the composer tapped into a feeling of residential district. Over a gentle habanera rhythm, the greek chorus intoned name calling on Evergreen plant Cemetery tombstones; the effect was touching and lingering.
Gershon made surely that every other piece on the plan, save Henryk Górecki's cover girl "Lobgesang," had an L.A. joining. The Los Angeles Symphony orchestra was represented by music theatre director Esa-Pekka Salonen's sensual "Two Songs From the Kalender Röd" and consulting composer Steven Stucky's dipsomaniac Triad New Motets. Local composer Eric Whitacre's "When David Heard" focused on the speech "my logos" in fragments that were shouted or whispered. Finally, former Maestro Chorale composer in abidance Morten Lauridsen accompanied Gershon's matchlessly polished choir on piano in his gracefully smooching "Nocturnes." For this occasion, he also added a quiet benediction on Rainer Maria Rilke's "Voici le soir" to the three-movement piece.
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