Exactly 60 years ago this month, the Los Angeles Times reported on the formation of a new choral ensemble, which would be known as the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Led by the visionary music director and educator Roger Wagner, long a key figure in the city’s choral music scene, the chorus launched its inaugural season on January 27, 1965, with a performance of Bach’s B minor Mass in the newly opened Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
The LA Master Chorale thus became a founding resident company, alongside the LA Philharmonic, of the emerging Los Angeles Music Center. (Still to come were Los Angeles Opera and the Center Theatre Group.) In addition to its permanent partnership with the Philharmonic, the LA Master Chorale was established as an independent professional chorus with a season all its own—a status that from the beginning set it apart. None of America’s other major cultural centers from this era (think Lincoln Center and, a few years later, the Kennedy Center) envisioned a similarly prominent position for choral music.
This evening’s concert celebrates the start of the 60th anniversary season “with a focus on the ensemble itself,” says Grant Gershon, the LA Master Chorale’s Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director. “I wanted to create a program that has lots of big, iconic choral pieces and is almost exclusively a cappella.”
The musical menu spans from the Renaissance to the turn of the 20th century (with an excursion into the present by way of South Korean choral composer Hyowon Woo’s unique arrangement of Amazing Grace). This opening concert singles out peak moments from the LA Master Chorale’s past, while the season’s concluding program in June, New Renaissance, will turn our attention to voices of today who represent the future of the art.
Roger Wagner, who directed the Master Chorale from 1964 to 1986, described his “ideal of sound” as closely connected to “the purity of sound in church choirs and in Renaissance music.” The inaugural season reflected Wagner’s mission of presenting choral masterpieces from the repertoire—Bach’s B minor Mass and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven (with Robert Shaw as guest conductor) were highlights—along with his love of early music.
Decades before the Master Chorale appeared, native Angeleno Paul Salamunovich had been mesmerized by hearing one of Wagner’s choirs singing Gregorian chant at his small church. He eventually joined the Roger Wagner Chorale and served as assistant conductor of the LA Master Chorale over its first decade. Following Scottish conductor John Currie’s five-year tenure at the helm, Salamunovich returned to become music director in 1991, reaffirming the founding values emphasized by his mentor Wagner.
Early music thus became an integral part of the Master Chorale’s DNA, as the first set on our program reflects. With its six-part texture, William Byrd’s English setting of Psalm 81 in Sing Joyfully is brilliantly tailored for the display of public festivity, while Music Divine by Thomas Tomkins revels in the word painting of the secular madrigal that flourished a generation later in the English Renaissance.
We fast forward to the Venetian Baroque with Antonio Lotti’s poignant Crucifixus, an eight-part motet (short choral piece to a sacred text), and then move back again to the Renaissance and another Psalm setting as we encounter Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, a Spanish-born composer whose career centered around the Puebla de Los Angeles in 17th-century Mexico.
The next set presents four composers from the Romantic 19th century, including two motets by Anton Bruckner, whose 200th birthday the music world celebrated last month. Just as in his monumental symphonies, he beckons listeners beyond their routine sense of time in these reverberantly spacious, a cappella miniatures.
Josef Rheinberger, a Bach-loving Romantic, initially composed his beautiful motet Abendlied (“Evening Song”) when he was only 15. Lay a Garland, written by the English amateur composer Robert Lucas Pearsall in 1840, sets a famous secular poem.
Both Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff wrote choral music for the Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom—the former even declared the service to be “one of the greatest productions of art”—yet their efforts were rejected by Orthodox authorities as too distracting on account of their musical beauties. Rather than rely on existing chants, Rachmaninoff wrote entirely original music for his setting. The experience paved the way for his better-known All-Night Vigil, a signature work of the Master Chorale.
Since 2001, when he took on the reins from Salamunovich, Grant Gershon has introduced significant innovations by bringing music of our time into the spotlight while also furthering the LA Master Chorale’s legacy of interpreting the great works of the choral repertoire. On a program in 2008, he led the U.S. premiere of Henryk Górecki’s Lobgesang from 2000, two years before the Polish composer’s death. Górecki had composed this “song of praise” as a “musical greeting” paying homage to Johannes Gutenberg on his 600th birthday.
The first-ever composer residency actually began in the Salamunovich years, when Morten Lauridsen was invited to take on that role. In the process, he became one of the world’s most frequently performed choral composers at work today—in no small part thanks to the enormous impact of his transportive Christmas motet, O Magnum Mysterium, which was commissioned in 1994 by founding board member Marshall Rutter as a gift for his wife, Terry Knowles, former President & CEO of the LA Master Chorale. The piece’s 30th anniversary marks the exact midway point in the ensemble’s lifespan to date, and O Magnum Mysterium remains one of its most awe-inspiring achievements.
Gershon’s creative programming has expanded the singers’ repertoire by exploring a variety of American vernacular musical styles as well as folk traditions from around the world. Both of these come together in South Korean composer Hyowon Woo’s arrangement of Amazing Grace, which incorporates a traditional Korean solo for soprano within the iconic hymn.
The late Alice Parker created her beloved arrangement Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal from the shape-note hymn tradition. The music of the prolific Angeleno composer and pianist Elinor Remick Warren, who later married Master Chorale founding board member Z. Wayne Griffin, is represented by her mixed-chorus part song At Midnight from 1936, which sets a poem by James Russell Lowell. Zion’s Walls is a tent-revival spiritual that Aaron Copland also used in his sole opera, The Tender Land. Venezuelan composer Antonio Estévez draws on folk rhythms and imitative effects from the voices for Mata del anima sola (“Tree of the Lonely Soul”).
The influential arranger, pianist, and conductor Moses Hogan’s arrangement of the church hymn Abide with Me provided desperately needed balm on a virtual program during the pandemic, while his tour-de-force setting of the African American spiritual Elijah Rock captures both the pain and the jubilant hope of this quintessentially American genre.
Gershon remarks that Leonard Bernstein’s Make Our Garden Grow, the uplifting final number from his brilliant 1956 music theater work Candide, might serve as an alternate title for this anniversary program: “The theme really is how we’ve laid the soil and planted the seeds, continuing to nurture this organization and this art form. Like a garden, it’s not just one crop but a rich variety of genres and eras.” Time indeed to sing Alleluia!
Thomas May is the program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale