Review: Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Hall

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File Roberto Sierra’s impressive “Missa Latina” under contemporary liturgical music with a twist — or two or three. For starters, the musical language swerves gamely between Western classical music and aspects of his Puerto Rican heritage. The work’s title itself refers to both the conventional Latin text and passages of Latin musical colors and energies.

Sierra’s expansive, 75-minute 2006 work — the composer’s most ambitious venture to date — was given a mostly glorious West Coast premiere performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday, as the suitably grand season-closing event for the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Assured and adventurous Master Chorale director Grant Gershon beautifully handled the expanded population of choral and orchestral forces filling the Disney stage. Up front, soprano Heidi Grant Murphy and baritone Daniel Teadt (subbing on short notice for the ailing Nathaniel Webster, and doing a fine job of it) gave focused readings of the texts in Sierra’s piece, which included both traditional mass elements and added “prayers for peace.”

Clearly, there’s a lot to take in and consider in Sierra’s opus. It’s a fascinating journey of a piece to experience, even if the calculated meeting of musical threads not normally sharing concert air-space doesn’t always flow seamlessly (partly because of the unevenness of the musical approach to Latin rhythms).

Sierra takes advantage of the massed forces involved, with its enhanced sonic and dramatic possibilities, and, despite the unorthodox nature of his project, keeps a close watch on the project’s accessibility. For much of the piece, the composer — a protégé of the late avant-garde great György Ligeti — heeds the lure of the lovely, consonant melodic turn and conventional musical vocabularies. Some Ligeti-esque touches do sneak into the Credo, with its discreetly dissonant cloud-like choral washes punctuated by sharp orchestral accents. Yet the climax-seeking sweep of the Gloria and the glimmering resolutions of the “alleluia” moments in the Offertorium and the Agnus Dei are the emotive norm in the work, more about peaceable nature than spiritual tumult.

This is, as they say, not your father’s Mass, but it’s not your son’s, either. With “Missa Latina,” Sierra has concocted a unique musical amalgam, with roots in his native tradition as well as the deep legacy of musical liturgy, but also with links to the pluralistic, multicultural musical now.

-- Josef Woodard

File photo of Grant Gershon by Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times