MUSIC REVIEW : 20th-Century Works End Master Chorale’s 29th Season

Forever in transition, the Los Angeles Master Chorale ended its crucial 29th season--a concert year that began with the death of its founding director, Roger Wagner--by performing, of all things, a program of music from this century.

The chorale’s three decades of residence at the Music Center have not seen the ensemble give an abundance of such programs.

Brief novelties we have been served; full-length masterpieces, not so often. Friday night, then, it was something of a surprise to hear, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, two choral works, from 1947 and 1987, respectively, that can arguably be termed major.

The beauteous and haunting Requiem by Maurice Durufle may not be, in any context including comparable works by Faure, Stravinsky, Bartok and Britten, a work of great originality or moment. But it is incontrovertibly one worthy of survival.

Closing the season, he has dedicated to his mentor and colleague, Roger Wagner, Paul Salamunovich, the L.A. Master Chorale’s current music director, led his singers and the Sinfonia Orchestra through a handsome and fluent reading of the colorful work.

The choral performance had urgency and sweep but no stridency, certainly no vocal blemishes; rich sound and an unforced spirituality emerged clearly from the massed singers. The Sinfonia Orchestra, over the years a most inconsistent body of players, this time proved mellow, skillful and immaculate in musical profile.

Argento’s 45-minute Te Deum, first introduced to the West Coast just six weeks ago (by John Alexander and his Pacific Chorale), sounds like a work of great importance. Juxtaposing liturgical and vernacular words in Latin and Middle English, it deals unflinchingly, and wittily, with subjects like God and Death and theology, involving and touching the listener at every point.

Aurally, it is a stunner: harmonically acerbic yet tonal, textually vivid, dramatic, poignant and uplifting. Except for momentary thinness of tone and occasional muddiness of word, the choral performance, under Salamunovich’s expert guidance, seemed to bring fervid life to the score. The Sinfonia Orchestra used a wide and colorful palette, yet never covered the singers.

Composer Argento, a longtime resident of Minnesota, shared bows with Salamunovich and the assembled forces from the Pavilion stage.