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MUSIC REVIEW
Master Chorale in the Persian market
Eve Beglarian's 'Sang' (Stone) draws on age-old texts and varied musical traditions in its world premiere at Disney Hall.
By
Josef Woodard, Special to The Times
June 5, 2007
When the stars align and the programming manages to both soothe and challenge,
the Los Angeles Master Chorale's current Grant Gershon-directed era can suggest
a high-water mark in choral aesthetics.
Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall was one of those nights, as the chorale
offered up an evening of music from the last quarter-century by living composers
with profound and fresh ideas of how to refresh vocal music while respecting an
orthodoxy that goes back centuries. What with Disney Hall's enchanted acoustical
kingdom and inspired ambience, the pieces were in place for a profound choral
encounter.
Centering the program was a world premiere, "Sang" (Stone) by Eve Beglarian, a
composer increasingly well-known for her inventive culling of elements from
different musical traditions, texts and cultures. As part of the Master
Chorale's "L.A. Is the World" commissioning project, designed to showcase new
compositions and the healthy population of musicians from varied cultures living
in the Southland, this project put Beglarian's symbiosis-seeking energies to
fruitful use.
Initially drawing on a parable from the 10th century Persian epic "Shahnameh,
the Book of Kings" for inspiration, Beglarian also wove in biblical texts from
the Hebrew and Greek. Musically, she combined choral sounds and the masterful
improvised work of two L.A.-based Persian musicians: percussionist Pejman Hadadi
and santur (71-string hammer dulcimer) player Manoochehr Sadeghi.
Hadadi opened with a nuanced drum solo, out of which a soft thrum of voices
built up an atmospheric rather than emphatic effect. After a vibrant santur and
percussion interlude in the middle, a choral vapor washed into the ensemble
sound.
In the main, the chorale was used to generate an impressionistic blur, with
little in the way of detectable structural parameters. But the piece affirmed
that among her contemporaries, Beglarian is a humane, idealistic rebel and a
musical sensualist.
Cross-hatching of a different sort underscores Scottish composer James
McMillan's "Magnificat and Nunc Dimitris," which opened the program. Drawing on
two separate textual sources, the work also weaves together contrasting musical
parts. An often dissonant and querulous organ part — played grandly by David
Goode — includes fistfuls of notes that nicely rattled the Disney rafters, while
the choral parts are more pure and "in the tradition."
Perhaps inevitably, though, Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt's music stole the
show on this night, as it is wont to do. The glibly but reasonably dubbed
"mystical Minimalist's" sweeping "Te Deum" is as moving, if not more so, than
when it was first heard in the mid-'80s, especially when given as conscientious
and lucid a performance as Gershon led Sunday.
With a luminous chamber-sized orchestra onstage and singers scattered both
onstage and up in the rear of the hall, the antiphonal and scattered parts were
exchanged both spatially and musically. In short, the evening's Pärt boasted the
desired blend of qualities at once modern and medieval, visceral and ethereal.
Such Pärtian paradoxes find an ideal forum in the ancient realm of choral music.