The L.A. Chorale’s New Master : Music: Veteran conductor and choral missionary Paul Salamunovich will be the group’s third music director. He replaces John Currie on Sept. 1.

The search took over a year, and brought up names from across the United States and Europe. But in the end, the Los Angeles Master Chorale turned to its roots for a new music director, naming Paul Salamunovich to the post.

“I’m sort of like the prodigal son, come back,” Salamunovich said Thursday just before a press conference at the Music Center where he was publicly introduced. “My choral heritage is this group.”

Salamunovich, 63, a veteran conductor in concert, recordings, film and television, has agreed to a three-year contract, effective Sept. 1. He follows John Currie as only the third music director in the Master Chorale’s 27 years.

“This is a very awesome experience, to be brought back to be music director of an organization I saw born,” Salamunovich said.

Salamunovich has already told Loyola Marymount University--where he has taught since 1958--that this year will be his last.

“This position requires a lot of time and organizational work,” Salamunovich noted. “The chorale is much different than it was, and its going to be demanding to learn new organizational concepts.”

Salamunovich is very much aware that he returns to the Master Chorale at a difficult time for the organization and for choral music generally in this country.

“We’re at a low ebb, in society in general, in appreciation for the choral art,” he said. “To be truthful, I feel that today we have to rebuild the choral audience that was there automatically in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

Salamunovich’s ideas for this include an increased outreach presence. A much-traveled missionary for choral singing, he has more than 600 festival and clinic appearances around the world already under his belt. He has thoughts about new directions for repertory, and says that prominent guest conductors from around the world--naming a special interest in Scandinavian choirs--will lead concerts each season. The chorale is also pursuing a recording contract.

But the emphasis must be on producing a choral product of total involvement.

“I have a very distinctive tonal concept of my own, which I think has to change with the period and style of the music,” Salamunovich said. “But the prime requisite is to interpret the text which inspired the music. That demands constant involvement between conductor and chorus, involvement so strong that it reaches out to the audience and brings them in.”

He was born in Redondo Beach in 1927, and had his first encounter with Catholic liturgical music and Gregorian chant at age 10 in a parish boy choir. Shortly afterwards he heard one of Roger Wagner’s male choruses, and became entranced with the sound and repertory.

Following his discharge from the Navy in 1946, Salamunovich joined Wagner’s newly formed Los Angeles Concert Youth Chorus, the group that became the Roger Wagner Chorale in 1948 and formed the nucleus of the Master Chorale. Salamunovich served as assistant conductor of both from 1953 to 1977.

Salamunovich’s film credits range from “The Great Imposter” and “Trouble With Angels” to “True Confessions”--for which he coached Robert De Niro in Latin for the role of a priest--and most recently, “Flatliners,” for which he conducted choral segments. He sang professionally in a male quartet with bandleader Stan Kenton in the ‘50s, and was a soloist for Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft at the Ojai Festival and Monday Evening Concerts.

He also succeeded Wagner as music director at St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood in 1949, a post he still holds. His St. Charles boy choir has been featured on television on “The Lucy Show” and with Dinah Shore in the “Chevy Show,” and the St. Charles boys also formed the Disneyland Boys Choir, with which Salamunovich recorded the “It’s a Small World” album of folk songs in 1965, a recording still sold at Disney theme parks.

From its founding in 1964 to 1985, the Master Chorale had only one music director: Wagner. He was replaced by John Currie, but early in his five-year contract Currie announced that he would not seek its renewal.

That launched a search process, which a year later narrowed the field of candidates to four: Salamunovich; British musician Simon Halsey, chorus master for the City of Birmingham Symphony; Thomas Somerville, professor of music at Occidental College, and William Hall, music director of the Master Chorale of Orange County, who withdrew his name from consideration just two days before Salamunovich was announced. Hall cited a Master Chorale requirement that he give up his Orange County commitments if he should be offered the job, which was confirmed by Marshall Rutter, president of the Master Chorale board.