The New Yorker - USA (2022-04-18)

66 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022

MUSICAL EVENTS

PYRAMID OF SOUND

How the L.A. Master Chorale turns precision into wonder.

BY ALEXROSS

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN PHAM

T

he human animal has an instinc-
tive awe of sounds from above. In
the Hebrew Bible, God makes his pres-
ence felt as a voice in the firmament,
as a whirlwind, as thunder. In the mod-
ern age, technological threats rumble
overhead—helicopters, drones, planes
that f ly ominously low. Sound from
above is chastening; it destroys the il-
lusion that we are masters of our envi-
ronment. In musical terms, though, awe
can turn to wonder. Some part of me
is still reeling from a performance of
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony that the
great choral conductor Robert Shaw
led at Carnegie Hall, in 1995. More than
five hundred singers were deployed on-

stage and in the first- and second-tier

boxes. In my orchestra seat, I felt not

so much surrounded by sound as inun-

dated by it. Near the end of the work,

in a passage marked “like a breath,” the

chorus intones Goethe’s words “Alles

Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Ev-

erything ephemeral is but an allegory”).

Each voice was singing as quietly as

possible, yet the weight of the collec-

tive was overpowering.

I felt the same happy abjection at a

recent gala concert by the Los Angeles

Master Chorale, at Disney Hall. This

perennially superb ensemble, which is

celebrating twenty years under the di-

rection of Grant Gershon, began the

evening with its singers occupying the

hall’s topmost balconies. The opening

group of pieces included “Vide homo,”

from Orlande de Lassus’s 1594 madri-

gal cycle “Lagrime di San Pietro” (“Tears

of St. Peter”), which the Master Cho-

rale has performed in a theatricalized

version by Peter Sellars. The text tells

of Christ’s suffering on humanity’s be-

half. To hear the music as an emanation

from above amplified its meaning in an

uncanny way: the voice in the firma-

ment was broken, lamenting.

No recording could have captured

the effect. Such shiver-inducing mo-

ments depend on the physical presence

of performers, on the live acoustics of a

space, on the disposition of an audience.

They also depend on musical technique.

When the A-major triads at the outset

of the Lassus are immaculately tuned,

as they were at Disney, they acquire their

own depth of field, as if an invisible ar-

chitecture were coming into view.

T

he Master Chorale, which presents
its own concert series at Disney and
also appears regularly with the L.A. Phil-
harmonic, was founded in 1964 by Roger
Wagner, a legendarily flamboyant cho-
ral director whose reputation rivalled that
of Shaw. Wagner instituted a high stan-
dard, drawing on a vast talent pool that
included Hollywood studio musicians.
(Wagner had been a member of the
M-G-M chorus, singing in musicals
behind the likes of Jeanette MacDon-
ald.) Wagner talked about a “pyramid of
sound,” with the lower voices always
prominent. Paul Salamunovich, Wag-
ner’s protégé and eventual successor, car-
ried on this philosophy, and it remains
in force. The Master Chorale habitually
avoids the sort of enthusiastic fuzziness
you often encounter in symphonic cho-
ruses: the ensemble is thrillingly clear.
Even as Gershon has retained the
Master Chorale’s finished sound, he
has led the group in new directions.
He strives to avoid the appearance of
what he has called a “phalanx of sing-
ers,” instead cultivating individual ar-
tistic personalities. A sixty-one-year-
old native of Southern California, he
is in some ways an outsider to the cho-
ral world, having studied piano in his
youth and then serving as an assistant
conductor at L.A. Opera and the L.A.
The chorus is pristine in sound and purposeful in motion. Phil. Strongly invested in contemporary