MUSIC REVIEW : St. Alban’s Choir Sings Bach

The forces that conductor James Vail gathered Sunday for an afternoon of Bach seemed impressive enough. Vail matched his own well-drilled choir and soloists of St. Alban’s Church in Westwood with an orchestra built around concertmaster Gregory Maldonado and members of the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra. The continuo contingent included harpsichordist Malcolm Hamilton and organist William Beck.

The results, however, emphasized the disparities--in ability and stylistic stance--among the assembled musicians. That the performers also demonstrated dissenting ideas about pitch and tempo only added to the decidedly mixed impression of an uncontrolled assembly.

Vail’s approach to three works from Bach’s first years in Leipzig--the cantatas “Jesu, der du meine Seele” and “Die Himmel erzahlen die Ehre Gottes,” BWV 78 and 76, and the motet “Jesu, meine Freunde,” BWV 227--seemed benign laissez-faire. His singers applied generous vibrato, the strings none; choir and vocal soloists sang in long legato lines, while the orchestra broke up the same phrases into detached bits.

And so it went. Because of its own formal logic and lack of recitatives and arias, “Jesu, meine Freunde” fared best. Vail elicited a nicely balanced reading, supply sung and tidily accompanied.

Soprano Frances Young, mezzo Adelaide Sinclair, tenor Darryl Taylor and baritone Norman Goss all offered bright clear voices, though it was hard to distinguish ornament from vibrato in their solo and duet assignments. Sinclair’s rich, fluent aria in “Die Himmel erzahlen” proved their most notable achievement.

The instrumental obbligatos ranged from the squeaky, period-practice efforts of Maldonado and viola da gambist Mark Chatfield, through Stuart Horn’s mellow oboe d’amore playing, to the confident, more blandly astylistic contributions of flutist Salpy Kerkonian and trumpeter Jon Lewis.