Los Angeles Master Chorale's Almost A Capella Program January 31, 2010

Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Almost A Capella Program Features West Coast Premieres of Nico Muhly’s
Bright Mass with Canons and First Service
Sunday, January 31, 2010, 7 p.m., at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Almost A Cappella Program Conducted by Music Director Grant Gershon

The Los Angeles Master Chorale continues its 46th season with an almost a cappella program anchored by the West Coast premieres of two works by noted New York-based composer Nico Muhly – Bright Mass with Canons and First Service – on Sunday, January 31, 2010, 7:00 p.m., at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Other works include Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s sensuous 21-minute Le cantique des cantiques, based on the love poetry from “Song of Songs,” Tarik O’Regan’s Confirma hoc Deus, and Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, written in 1922 but not performed until 1963 because the composer believed it “unworthy,” though the piece is now considered one of the choral monuments of the 20th Century. Gershon conducts and will participate in Listen Up!, the pre-concert talk at 6:00 p.m. with KUSC’s Alan Chapman. Kimo Smith is the guest organist.

Muhly, pairing ancient music techniques with a minimalist bent, wrote the reverent Bright Mass with Canons in 1995 for the choir of St. Thomas Church in New York City. Gershon says, “It takes the purity of the Anglican tradition of choral music and gives it a modern veneer, making it clearly of the here and now.”

First Service was composed by Muhly in 2004 and premiered the same year at Girton College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Describing the work, Muhly states, “The Magnificat features an anxious two-note octave in the organ, nervously twitching in anticipation. The Nunc Dimittis (which is one of my favorite things written in the English language) starts slowly, and then focuses all of its energy towards the beginning of the Gloria Patri, a New Testament harmonic culling of everything that has come before it.”

The Chorale presented the West Coast premiere of Muhly’s Expecting The Main Things from You in February 2009. Among his numerous projects, Mulhy composed the score for the 2009 Academy Award-nominated film The Reader.

Gershon calls Daniel-Lesur’s Le cantique des cantiques “one of the most sensuous and gorgeous a cappella French compositions ever written.” The seven-movement work was written for 12-part unaccompanied voices, mixing French and Latin text drawn from “Song of Songs” as well as from New Testament texts.

Describing Martin’s austere but inspiring Mass for Double Choir, a showcase for choir, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross states, “It sounds like a Renaissance mass lost in time.” He notes Martin had “a gift for immersing himself in styles of the past without seeming to imitate them.”

Noted for his eclectic body of work that includes thrilling choral pieces, O’Regan composed Confirma hoc Deus for mixed choir and organ. Born in London in 1978, the two-time British Composer Award winner currently divides his time between New York City and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts, having previously held the Fulbright Chester Schirmer Fellowship in Music Composition at Columbia University and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard.

Concert tickets to range from $19 to $124. Student Rush seats are $10 and are available at the box office two hours before the performance. For tickets and information, please call (213) 972-7282, or visit www.lamc.org. (Tickets can no longer be purchased at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Box Office except on concert days starting 2 hours prior to the performance.) The Walt Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue at First Street in downtown Los Angeles.

Official Website: http://www.lamc.org