Dual Program Celebrates Maestro Salamunovich’s 70th

Celebrating the 70th birthday this week of music director Paul Salamunovich, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, with the Sinfonia Orchestra, closed its latest season with a display program both substantial and entertaining.

Salamunovich chose the agenda--the Requiem (1888) by Gabriel Faure and Dominick Argento’s recent Te Deum--from among his favorite works. Sunday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, these works complemented and fulfilled each other, showing off the two ensembles’ wide range of vocal and instrumental dynamics and colors.

The Requiem, an understated paean of emotional containment, delivered richly its wealth of gentleness and quiet grief. The Master Chorale has long specialized in the sort of articulate soft singing demanded by this score; this time, it also rose to the climactic peaks that define the work’s form. Under Salamunovich’s solid and detailed leadership, both chorale and orchestra used their resources artfully.

Stepping out of the chorale to sing the solos were soprano Virenia Lind and baritone Jim Drollinger.

Argento’s 9-year-old Te Deum mixes Latin and Middle English, religious fervor and secular frenzy, the liturgical and the vernacular, pointed tonality and a post-Impressionistic idiom. It is a three-ring circus of a piece, entertaining, prayerful, touching and deep--not unlike the collages of Charles Ives and Darius Milhaud--and a reminder of Argento’s preeminence as a writer of operas.

Salamunovich and his colleagues, who first performed it, according to the conductor, five years ago, had great fun with it and never forgot to deliver the words clearly. Their fun proved infectious.

At the end, composer Argento--whose own 70th birthday will take place in October--shared in the bows and the singing of “Happy Birthday.”