A Baroque Evening With Master Chorale

The latest concert of the Los Angeles Master Chorale--Sunday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--was just about as routine as celebrations come. The Master Chorale is a well-oiled machine these days under Paul Salamunovich--it never sings badly.

But under the workaday leadership of guest conductor David Hayes, artistic director of the Philadelphia Singers, the chorale could only do so much with a lengthy Baroque agenda dedicated to festive music.

Hayes is a solid musician but apparently not a Baroque specialist. He presided over Bach’s Cantata, “Ein fest Burg ist unser Gott,” his Magnificat, Vivaldi’s Gloria, and two Coronation anthems by Handel in a serviceable manner, with nary a hint of the historically informed stylistic practices we have come to expect nowadays.

The concert chugged along though, with good music professionally executed. The low point was over quickly, coming with the opening Bach cantata, an intricate network of contrapuntalism here rendered as haze by the 47-member chorale and 30-member Sinfonia Orchestra.

Thereafter, the composers supplied simpler choral textures. These worked better (occasional diffuseness aside) in Hayes’ strange placement of the chorus--alternating man, woman, man, woman, rather than in the usual sectional divisions.

Hayes showed strong expressive abilities in the slower passages of the Vivaldi and kept the jaunty Handel anthems “Zadok the Priest” and “The King Shall Rejoice” always merry and bright. The vocal quartet--Rosa Lamoreaux, Christina Wilcox, Kenneth Garner and Christopheren Nomura--gave assured performances. The Sinfonia trumpeters provided lightning bolts in the Bach pieces.