Conductor Is Taking a Risk With Full Program of Poulenc

It’s fairly easy to pull in a large audience with a concert devoted to the music of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, said Orange Coast Chorale conductor Richard Raub. But venturing a program of nothing but Poulenc is a different tune.

That’s why Raub is a little bit worried about the Poulenc program he will lead today at the Costa Mesa campus.

“It’s a little scary to take a risk like this,” Raub said in a recent phone interview. “It’s not doing the safe thing. We can always do Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart and get people out. With this, it is different.”

So why take the chance?

“I think this music is very ingratiating. People may be scared away, thinking they don’t want to hear a whole concert by Poulenc. But I feel certain that those who come will feel rewarded.”

Raub has programmed three pieces that, he believes, “represent not only a tremendous amount of variety but also represent three different faces of Poulenc.”

The works are the “Litanies a la Vierge Noire,” the “Stabat Mater” and the “Gloria.”

Raub described the “Litanies,” scored for only women’s voices, strings and timpani, as “extremely prayer-like from beginning to end. It has an extremely devotional quality to it,” he said.

The work proved a turning point for the composer, Raub said. “He had only written one choral piece before this (the ‘Chanson a Boire,’ composed in 1922). This (‘Litanies’) was written in 1936 and really paved the way. He became enthusiastic for choral writing and afterwards wrote a great many choral pieces.”

One of these is the frequently performed “Gloria,” a work Raub described as having “rather brilliant moments as well as reflective ones.”

Less well-known is the “Stabat Mater,” the third work on the program.

“It is a much more difficult piece for the performers,” Raub said. “The music is much harder to learn and sing. . . . Poulenc’s harmonic texture is more dense in that piece, so it’s harder to hear and sing in tune.”

But if Raub is concerned about the size of the audience, he isn’t worried about his singers’ ability to handle the difficulty of the music, even though his Orange Coast Chorale (at 85 members) and Orange Coast Singers (32) are singers drawn from the community who enroll in choral classes at the college. “There’s no secret,” he said. “We just work like hell.”

Richard Raub will conduct the Orange Coast Chorale and Orange Coast Singers in a Poulenc program at 8 p.m. today in the Robert B. Moore Theatre, Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road in Costa Mesa. Featured soloist will be soprano Kimberly Allman. Tickets: $8 in advance; $9.50 at the door. Information: (714) 432-5527.