By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
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Los Angeles Master Chorale; Grant Gershon, conductor
Sunday, October 16, 2011 • Walt Disney Concert Hall
Next concert: Nov. 13, 2011 at 7 p.m. Gershon conducts David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, the U.S. premiere of James Newton’s Mass and two motes by J.S. Bach (INFO)
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Grant Gershon (left), music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, LOVES program titles. When he designed last night’s concert — the opening event in the ensemble’s 48th season — he originally called it “From Here to Eternity.” Other marketing mavens intervened, however, and the title ended up as “Lux Aeterna,” in honor of Morten Lauridsen’s famous choral work that concluded the program at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Smart move; the house was packed last night, which isn’t a surprise. Since the Master Chorale commissioned the work from Lauridsen in 1997, no other piece has more defined the ensemble. And it’s not just the Master Chorale that loves it. Since it was premiered and then recorded by the ensemble and its former music director, Paul Salumunovich, Lux Aeterna has become one of the most popular choral pieces written in recent years. In last night’s preconcert “Listen Up!” program, KUSC radio host Alan Chapman remarked that whenever Lux Aeterna is played during one of his station’s innumerable pledge drives, phones ring off the hook with donations.
However, the piece performed last night was quite a ways removed from the orchestral version that most people know. Gershon chose instead to accompany the 30-minute work with Paul Meier (associate organist at St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire Blvd.) playing the 6,100-pipe Disney Hall organ. (Lauridsen — obviously a canny businessman — wrote both versions of Lux Aeterna simultaneously, knowing that far more choruses and church choirs would be able to perform it with an organ accompanying instead of hiring an orchestra).
Thus, last night’s Lux Aeterna had quite a different sound and feel to it, but that wasn’t all due to Meier. Gershon himself put his own distinctive stamp on last night’s performance, as well. The 115-member Chorale was much more expressive and subtle than on the recording, employing impeccable diction and bringing great feeling to the Latin texts in the five connected movements, including its most famous section, O Nata Lux.
I wasn’t totally sold on all of Meier’s registrations and the balance between choir and organ wasn’t always perfect but the opening notes, beginning with a single note from one of Frank Gehry’s 32-foot wooden organ pipes, and the transition from O Nata Lux to Veni, Sancte Spiritus were particularly effective. The audience was mesmerized; there were at least 10 seconds of silence after the final Amen before the hall erupted in a standing ovation for Gershon, the Chorale and, in particular, Lauridsen, who was in the audience.
The opening half of the program consisted of totally a cappella works, all written by still-living composers. The earliest work on the program dated from 1990: the U.S. premiere of Music for a big church; for tranquility by Swedish composer Thomas Jennefelt, a 10-minute vocalize exercise with the male voices setting a polyphonic chordal foundation while the women swirled above and below them.
The rest of the first-half pieces were notable for, among other things, the composers’ ability to fit their music expertly to poetic texts, beginning with Eric Whitacre’s 2002 anthem, Her Sacred Spirit Soars, which employs rising scales from a 10-part double chorus to accentuate a text by Charles Anthony Silvestri. The Chorale’s fortissimo ending raised the proverbial Disney Hall roof.
English composer Tarik O’Regan (whose first opera, Heart of Darkness, will be premiered next month at Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in London) used mostly homophonic writing that allowed the Chorale to declaim grim words by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda with great feeling. Leslie Leighton, the Chorale’s associate conductor, conducted but the Chorale couldn’t quite achieve the precision it demonstrated under Gershon in the rest of the program.
The upbeat strains of Heavenly Home, a “bluegrass triptych” of 19th century American folk hymns arranged by chorus member Shawn Kirchner, concluded the opening half. Premiered by the Chorale last year, the three arrangements proved to be a perfect antidote to Neruda’s tragic depiction of a battle, even if Kirchner’s subject matter did deal with the trip from this life to the next. As far as Kirchner and the text writers are concerned, the trip (and its destination) will be joyous. Jaunty arrangements of Unclouded Day and Hallelujah bracketed the winsome Angel Band, in which Kirchner gave his fellow tenors soaring melodic lines in the middle verse.
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Hemidemisemiquavers:
• Among the more interesting tidbits from the preconcert lecture was the revelation that Lauridsen (who has been a professor at the USC Thornton School of Music for more than 30 years) reads poetry every day and begins every class with a poem.
• Photo caption: Grant Gershon conducted the Los Angeles Master Chorale last night in Walt Disney Concert Hall, the opening concert of the Chorale's 48th season. Photo credit: Alex Berliner for Los Angeles Master Chorale.Photo credit: Alex Berliner for Los Angeles Master Chorale
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.
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STORY AND LINKS: Rising-star conductor Mei-Ann Chen to lead Pasadena Symphony
By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
A shorter version of this article was first published today in Pasadena Scene magazine.
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Pasadena Symphony Orchestra, Mei-Ann Chen, conductor; James Ehnes, violin
Sat., Oct. 29, 2011; 2 and 8 p.m.
Huang: Saibei Dance; Korngold: Violin Concerto; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5
Ambassador Auditorium, 300 W. Green St., Pasadena
Tickets: $25-$100. Senior rush tickets ($15) for 2 p.m. concert only. Student rush tickets and “Sound Check” cards also available.
Information: 626/793-7172; www.pasadenasymphony-pops.org
Rising star Mei-Ann Chen will conduct the Pasadena Symphony on Oct. 29, the opening program in the PSO’s season at Ambassador Auditorium.
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Now into its second season without a music director, the Pasadena Symphony will once again be led in four of its five concerts by a parade of relatively unknown guest conductors. Consequently, audiences and musicians have learned to approach each program with a spirit of investigative adventure, wondering what sort of magic might come from each guest conductor.
Naturally in the back of many people’s minds is an unvoiced thought: “Will this guest be the PSO’s next music director?” (For the record, management continues to maintain that the orchestra is happy with the current plan of using guest conductors and is not actively seeking anyone to replace Jorge Mester as its next music director. James DePreist continues to act as music advisor and will lead the final concert this season).
However, the opening concerts for the PSO’s 2011-2012 season on Oct. 29 may turn out to be one of those events that people will one day look back and remember, “I was there.” That’s because the guest conductor will be Mei-Ann Chen, a 38-year-old, Taiwan-born dynamo who is one of the fastest-rising stars in the international conducting firmament.
That ascension was a long time getting off the launching pad. Although Chen is considerably older than wunderkind maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel, she considers herself a “baby” in the conducting world. She can still remember a time when, after receiving her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting from the University of Michigan she “received more rejection letters from orchestras than the number of notes I had conducted professionally,” as she notes wryly.
Even after Chen in 2005 became the first woman to win Denmark’s prestigious Malko conducting competition, opportunities were initially scarce. Eventually, however, doors started to crack open. Thanks to a fellowship from the League of American Orchestras, Chen (she has lived in the U.S. since 1989) completed successful assistant conductor stints with the Oregon, Atlanta and Baltimore symphonies. Those led to her first major appointment last year, when she became music director of the Memphis Symphony.
This year she also took the reins at the Chicago Sinfonietta, an orchestra similar to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in size and its need to define itself outside the orbit of one of the world’s great orchestras, the Chicago Symphony. Chen’s first concerts with her Chicago ensemble elicited rave reviews from music critics at the city’s two largest papers, John von Rein (LINK) and Andrew Patner (LINK).
In addition to these two significant leadership positions (she spends four weeks in Chicago and 12 in Memphis) Chen now has numerous guest-conducting requests beginning to flood in to her. She accepts about 20 each year.
“I feel very fortunate because I’m at a point where I have to pick and choose concerts to conduct,” says Chen. “The bad side is that unfortunately I have to turn down some requests for return appearances, which I hate to do because I don’t like disappointing an orchestra that gave me a chance and I like to maintain relationships with orchestras and their musicians.”
One of the invites she did choose was from the Pasadena Symphony. “They were interested early on,” remembers Chen, “and came to see and hear me conduct with the Pacific Symphony in Orange County last June,” a concert that earned a stellar review from Orange County Register Music Critic Timothy Mangan (HERE).
However, what really sold Chen on making the trip to the Crown City was the program, which she had a hand in creating.
The evening will open with the Saibei Dance (from Saibei Dance Suite No. 2) by An-Lun Huang, who was born in China but lives in Toronto. “He wrote during China’s Cultural Revolution [1966-1976],” explains Chen, “and, like thousands of people, was — because he was an artist — exiled to a farm/labor camp north of the Great Wall [Saibei means North]. One day each year, the residents in the community would put aside their struggles to celebrate the harvest, which in the midst of privation at leave gave them food. This piece celebrates that day.
“You’d think that being born in Taiwan that I’d know this piece,” continues Chen, “but it wasn’t until the Alabama Symphony decided to do a multicultural festival last year that I first conducted it. More importantly, it was also the first piece that I ever conducted with the Chicago Sinfonietta and it literally changed the entire search process there. Within five minutes, the musicians and I had fallen in love with each other and, even though I was a real long shot to replace Paul Freeman, [the Sinfonietta’s founding music director, who was retiring after 24 years], I was chosen. I think those first few minutes with this piece played a huge role in that decision and in my life.” Later in the year, she also conducted the piece during her Austria debut.
The middle work on the PSO program will be Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, with James Ehnes (right) as the soloist. “Korngold’s granddaughter, Katy Korngold Hubbard, got me into his music,” recalls Chen. “Korngold was sort of a genius but was one of those who got caught up in the Nazi Germany era. There were people in Europe at the time who believed that Korngold would become the next Mahler or Mozart.”
Korngold eventually fled to California where he gained fame for his motion picture scores; he won an Oscar for the score to The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. He also wrote the 1936 score for Anthony Adverse that also won the Oscar, although in those days the Academy presented the award to the music department head of the studio that produced the movie, not the composer. Korngold was also nominated for two other Oscars. Equally important, Korngold’s lush, romantic writing style paved the way for composers such as John Williams.
Korngold vowed never to write symphonic music until Hitler was defeated. With the end of World War II, he once again concentrated on music for the concert stage and the Violin Concerto, written in 1945, was his first effort in this “new life.” Jascha Heifetz premiered the concerto in 1947 with the St. Louis Symphony, but although Heifetz championed the piece but for decades, Korngold’s association with film music clouded his “classical” reputation with “purists.”
In recent years, Ehnes has become the new champion of the concerto. His recording (LINK) of the Korngold, Walton and Barber violin concertos, with Bramwell Tovey conducting the Vancouver Symphony, won the 2008 Grammy and Juno awards.
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, the concluding work on the PSO program, has a special place in Chen’s heart because it was the symphony she conducted when she won the Malko Competition. “There were 242 competitors from 40 countries,” remembers Chen, “and I had to be the longest of long shots. Some conductors had lots of experience conducting in Europe — one was a protégé of Valery Gergiev — and here I was, music director of a youth orchestra in a city (Portland, Ore.) that many people didn’t even know existed.”
Winning Malko eventually changed Chen’s life but the passion to conduct has been her goal since she was age 10. “I grew up in Taiwan as a very shy child,” she recounts. “At age 10, I became a violinist in an orchestra and saw my first conductor on the podium. I was hooked; I knew right then that’s what I wanted to do with my life. There’s a tremendous sense of power when you’re conducting because you’re trying to galvanize all of the separate energies on stage into one energy that can burst forth through the music.”
That sense of energy bursting forth is a recurrent theme in audience and critics’ reaction to her concerts. Andrew Patner in the Chicago Sun-Times called her “a rare talent.” Reviewing her inaugural concert as the Chicago Sinfonietta’s music director last month, John von Rhein wrote in the Chicago Tribune: “Chen … is a musician for whom ‘dynamic’ and ‘electric’ seem altogether too limiting. Her entire body is a bundle of podium energy; her keen ear and sharp eyes miss nothing. Thanks to her clear beat and articulate gestures, orchestral musicians pick up at once on her interpretive ideas, sending them out to the listener with much the same immediacy of effect.”
Now that Chen has gained a firm foothold in the conducting fraternity (which still includes very few women — JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginla Symphony, and Marin Alsop, who heads the Baltimore Symphony, are the two most prominent), she’s eager to pave the way for future conductors, both female and male.
One way she did that came earlier this year. Last January a guest conductor with the Memphis Symphony cancelled an October concert. “Rather than just find a substitute, I said to the orchestra and the musicians, ‘let’s do something really radical — let’s hold a conducting competition, instead.’ ” she explains.
The result was a whirlwind: decision in January, brochures distributed in February, entries in by March, preliminary rounds in April, finals in May. Despite the short notice, 236 people from 30 countries entered, in part because the jury included some significant people both in terms of musicianship and potential career-building opportunities. Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony and newly named head of the Aspen Music Festival, headed the jury, which included Anthony Fogg, artistic administrator of the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival, and Aaron Jay Kernis, Pulitzer-prize winning composer and professor at the Yale School of Music.
There was no age limit (nearly all competitions have either an upper or lower age limit, or both) and the first-prize winner was 40-year-old Ken Lam, who set aside a law career to pursue his love of music and conducting. Lam and the other two prize-winners will conduct a Memphis Symphony concert in October while Chen is in Pasadena.
“I’ve had so many people who have helped me during the past few years, “ says Chen. “As I grow more successful and come more into a position of power, I cannot but help others who are coming after me. It’s my time to turn the tables around.”
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.
