Chorale

The William Hall Chorale, augmented by a spiffy little orchestra, managed to meld Baroque sensibilities and the sheer volume of today's sonic allure in an exciting performance on Friday night of Handel's "Messiah." Performing in Pasadena Presbyterian Church, Hall had his 100-voice chorale scale down its massive output to manageable dynamic size, and the conductor's introduction of all manner of ornamentation was well executed by these forces.

Gabriela Lena Frank's "The Singing Mountaineer" is fond, alluring music that sounds like a vivid memory of a place that doesn't exist. It was written for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Los Angeles-based Latin American folk/jazz ensemble Huayucaltia and given its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall Sunday night as part of a program that focused on the choral music of Peru and Venezuela. The South American sound is usually pretty easy to identify. And 10 of the 11 works that Master Chorale music director Grant Gershon selected easily fit that bill.

The Pacific Chorale has announced a three-concert subscription series for its 1987-88 season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. In addition, the 140-member chorale will appear on three programs with the Pacific Symphony and in concerts at Hollywood Bowl and in Pasadena and Ojai. Music Director John Alexander will open the subscription series on Nov. 3 with a program entitled "Seas, Ships and Sails."

In November 2008, as the Great Recession pounded away, Opera Pacific closed its doors. Orange County was suddenly without a major resident opera company. But after nearly four years of drought, the Pacific Symphony is trying to step into the breach with concert opera over three years, one per season. It's a small step, but it's a step. They aren't taking any chances with repertoire, that's for sure. First out of the chute was that guaranteed crowd-pleaser, Puccini's "La Bohème" -- and yes, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall looked almost full on the ground floor Thursday night.

A rabble-rousing folk singer isn't the first person who comes to mind when drafting new lyrics for one of the most recognized pieces of classical music in the world. But British singer Billy Bragg, known for his politically charged pop songs, penned new lyrics for "Ode to Joy," the chorale finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Instantly recognizable from hundreds of commercials, movies and public performances (not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1989 protests in Beijing's Tianamen Square)

It seemed a bit pretentious to call the Los Angeles Master Chorale's Sunday program a "Beethoven Festival." But music director John Currie certainly took a big, bright, festive view of four middle-period works, to the obvious delight of the audience at the Music Center Pavilion. Currie's approach to the Mass in C was well within standard big-chorus parameters, with scant deference to period style.

The headline on the letter claiming deceptive advertising by the L.A. Master Chorale as "Not OK Chorale" was a classic, barely offsetting the tasteless "Misconception" and "Mama Mia!" headlines (Calendar Letters, June 15). But then, even Babe Ruth struck out twice for every homer. E.S. WALLER Culver City Not quite. Ruth struck out 1,330 times and hit 714 home runs.

The Ventura County Master Chorale, under the direction of Burns Taft, will commence a new performance season at 8 p.m. with a concert titled "Celebrate Life" at the Oxnard Civic Auditorium, 800 Hobson Way. The chorale will present a program of Stravinsky's "Les Noces," plus works by two contemporary composers, Ben Allaway's "Bandari, Inside These Walls"--a text that combines English and Swahili--and Dwight Stone's "5 Cantos Surenos," which was inspired by Mexican poet Alurista.

The University of Judaism billed its spring fund-raiser Sunday as "Alexander Toradze Brings Russia to the Gindi." The 37-year-old pianist defected from the Soviet Union in 1983, and his musically insightful tour was colored by an empathy for recent sorrows in his hometown Tbilisi, Georgia, which he remembered with the "Consolation" in B-flat, by Liszt. In that, as in Beethoven's Sonata Opus 109, Arno Babadjanian's "Six Pictures," and Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," Toradze proved himself a pianist of intelligent sensibility and easy power.

"The Stories of Ray Bradbury." Read by the author. Random House. (Two cassettes.) The most histrionically skillful author since Dickens reads nine of his short stories, including "The Anthem Sprinters" (a veritable chorale of Irish accents), "The Day It Rained Forever" and "The Strawberry Window" (settlers on Mars, yearning for their Midwest front porch).

Holiday Wonders: Festival of Carols; Los Angeles Master Chorale; Walt Disney Concert Hall; 2 p.m. Saturday; $19-$99 Holiday Sing-Along; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Walt Disney Concert Hall; 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Dec. 17; $33.35-$83.25 Holiday Organ Spectacular; Pacific Symphony; Segerstrom Hall; 7:30 p.m. Dec. 20; $15-$75

Fittingly, "The Lord of the Rings in Concert: The Fellowship of the Ring" is an epic undertaking. "It's such a huge score," said composer Howard Shore, who won an Oscar for his work on Peter Jackson's 2001 first installment in his ambitious "Lord of the Rings" trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkien beloved fantasy novel. "It's nearly three hours. It is really difficult to do. It requires 225 people on stage to play the music, a symphony orchestra and chorus. " For the performance, which comes to the Honda Center in Anaheim on Saturday, Ludwig Wicki conducts the Munich Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Chorale, Phoenix Boys Choir and soloist soprano Kaitlyn Lusk.

Classical composers don't generally attract hordes of screaming fans. But when Eric Whitacre appears at a convention, concert hall or college campus, groupies have been known to line up around the block hours in advance for the chance to meet the man with the flowing locks. With his latest album, "Light & Gold," debuting at No. 1 on the classical charts on both sides of the Atlantic, an enormous global following and a modeling contract to his name, Whitacre is arguably the first bona fide rock star to have emerged from the decidedly unglamorous field of contemporary choral music.

Near the end of last month's three-concert run at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, members of the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles paused to share some quiet time and recognize those who contributed to the shows' success. The tribute session took an unexpected turn when one of the group's newest singers raised his hand to speak. "I want to thank everyone for welcoming me," said tenor Chris Yraola, a 24-year-old music teacher from Eagle Rock. "It means a lot because, No. 1, I'm a little shy. And, No. 2, well, I'm a straight guy. " For a second, there was silence — "It was definitely a surprise," Yraola recalls — and then applause broke out. Some people hugged him. Some told him how proud they were.

By the time Namsoo Kim escaped from a North Korean prison at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he had been keeping a poetic diary about his harrowing experiences since his early teens. Kim's recently discovered writings, along with personal letters from his sister, serve as the text and structural spine for Mark Grey's innovative choral cantata, "Mugunghwa: Rose of Sharon. " Kim, who died in 2002, hovers over "Mugunghwa" like a ghost. His story stands for all survivors of the Korean War whose lives were turned upside down.

This summer, Grant Gershon became the first ever music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale to lead the vocal ensemble and the Los Angeles Philharmonic together in a concert. As final preparations for the event were underway at the Hollywood Bowl, Gershon showed no signs of apprehension. Appearing on the rehearsal podium in a black T-shirt and jeans with the bangs of his sandy hair flopping boyishly over his eyes, the conductor devoted his time to chatting about the history of Haydn's Te Deum, synchronizing phrase endings between the orchestra and chorus in Poulenc's Gloria and running through the solos in Vivaldi's Gloria with sopranos Jessica Rivera and Christine Brandes and alto Kelley O'Connor.

Royal Waltz Stanton, 78, nationally known choral conductor and teacher whose students included opera star Marilyn Horne. Born in Santa Monica and educated at UCLA, Stanton began his career directing music at Long Beach Polytechnic High School and then became chairman of the music department at Long Beach City College. In 1953, he founded the Long Beach Schola Cantorum, a symphonic choir that sang with Miss Horne among others.

The biggest mistake people make when talking about the outsourcing of U.S. jobs by U.S. companies is to treat it as a moral issue. Sure, it's immoral to abandon your loyal American workers in search of cheap labor overseas. But the real problem with outsourcing, if you don't think it through, is that it can wreck your business and cost you a bundle. Case in point: Boeing Co. and its 787 Dreamliner. The next-generation airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late; the first paying passengers won't be boarding until this fall, if then.

Nearly 20 years ago, Los Angeles Opera added its name to the list of commissioners of John Adams' opera about terrorism, "The Death of Klinghoffer." The company wrote a check and promised a Music Center production at some unspecified but not unreasonably distant time after the work's premiere in Brussels in 1991. The other co-commissioners -- Lyon Opera in France, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and San Francisco Opera -- mounted "Klinghoffer." L.A. Opera hesitated, perhaps worried about a mixed critical reaction and charges that the opera was anti-Semitic.