Now It’s His Turn

The large room is not really crowded, but the volume of sound in it gives that impression. About 60 people are lustily chanting a rhythmic mantra, watched carefully by their leader. “Pindovy aipopyi ai, Pindovy ipoty ramove ....”

Suddenly the tight unison stumbles, then fades out. The people look up sheepishly, but the leader’s smile never falters. “Well,” he says, “this is sort of a demented game of ‘Simon Says.’ Sometimes you say ‘pin,’ sometimes you don’t.”

Unlikely as it seems, this is the Los Angeles Master Chorale in rehearsal, prior to the Saturday night concert at the Music Center that opened its season. The possibly too-fearless leader is Grant Gershon, the ensemble’s new music director, and the matter at hand is Philip Glass’ “Itaipu.”

The text of this choral symphony is in the Guarani language of the South American Indians living along the Paraguay and Uruguay rivers, where the Itaipu dam and hydroelectric project went up starting in the late 1970s. The choral score demands close reading to determine where it repeats and where it plunges ahead in a vast, colorful chaconne, a sort of gaucho-Baroque passage.

The singers track it gamely. Gershon rewards the effort with frequent thumbs-up gestures. At the break, he is besieged by singers, including a contingent with ties to South America, eager to spread the word about this piece to their compatriots.

“I feel so strongly that when I treat the singers as artists, they respond as artists,” Gershon later says about his consistently encouraging affability and accessibility. “My generation, and the generation slightly before, no longer accept authority unquestioningly, and it is just a much more healthy way to make music.”

Yet Gershon is unquestionably the authority here--however collegial--and he’s bent on getting his acolytes to follow him into new territory.

“The Master Chorale is a great organization with a great history,” Gershon says. “I am very grateful to be inheriting an ensemble that operates at such a high level artistically. That said, the choral field in America is in great need of reenergizing, of reinvigorating and refocusing.”

When the rehearsal resumes, the final movement of “Itaipu” comes as a serene benediction. The singers settle comfortably into its sustained chords, Gershon does a little nip-and-tuck on the balances and phrasing, and the titanic effort comes to rest.

“Excellent work,” he nods. “It will be fine.”In some ways, Grant Gershon, 40, has been training all his life for the chance to lead this kind of music this way.

Growing up in Alhambra, with a piano teacher mother, he started music lessons when he was 5.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve been sitting on a piano bench,” Gershon says.

In the summer of 1973, after his freshman year in high school, Gershon attended a music camp, where he sang Mozart’s Requiem and found a calling for communal music-making.

“That was the life-changing experience,” he says. “That was the thing that made me realize I was really meant to be a musician. There was the experience of performing one of these apexes of Western civilization, but it was also the experience of making music with friends, in a group situation where the total is so much more powerful than the sum of the parts. That was it; I was hooked.”

Still, Gershon entered Chapman College in Orange as a double major in piano and voice, and when he transferred to USC, it was as a piano major. But he continued ensemble singing as well, and even his keyboard work was more focused on ensemble playing than solo performance.

“I was doing the [piano] competitions, doing my share of concerto performances. But what I always loved the most was collaborating with friends.”

Such interests and a knack for sight reading brought Gershon into the world of opera. In 1987, he joined the staff of Los Angeles Opera as a keyboardist and vocal coach, and he remained with the company until 1994. During that time, he served as principal pianist, vocal and language coach, and assistant conductor.

“It was the classic old-school path to becoming a conductor,” Gershon says, “learning from every possible angle. The more that I was working with really first-rate musicians, both at the opera and on other projects--John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle--the more confidence I gained in my own musical vision.

“And conversely, the more that I was working with conductors that I felt some frustration with, the more gumption I began to develop, a feeling of ‘Hey, I can do this. Give me that baton!’ ”

In 1990, Gershon was the pianist-coach for Los Angeles Opera’s production of “Nixon in China.” It kicked off a close association with both the composer, Adams, and the director, Peter Sellars, that would include coaching “Nixon in China” for several European productions, and being music director for the Adams/Sellars music theater piece “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.”

“Grant was the obvious choice for “Ceiling/Sky,” says Adams, “The score was a minefield of cross-rhythms and complex ensemble numbers. I couldn’t think of any other conductor who was so easily at home in the style I was composing for this piece.”

The Sellars connection led directly to Gershon’s next career step. In summer of 1992, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen were in residence at the Salzburg Festival, doing, among other things, Sellars’ production of Messiaen’s monumental opera “St. Francis of Assisi.” Gershon again was brought in as a rehearsal pianist and vocal coach. He calls it a “watershed experience,” partly because of how vast the project was and partly because it underlined his vision of himself as a conductor.

“There was a cast party after opening night,” he remembers. “Everybody was rather delirious. Both Esa-Pekka and Ernest Fleischmann [then managing director of the orchestra] took me aside and told me that they thought I was really cut out to be a conductor. I floated about 20 feet above the ground that night.”

The Philharmonic would continue to play an important role in Gershon’s development. In 1994, Salonen’s wife, Jane, was expecting the couple’s second child, and Gershon was asked to understudy the conductor’s programs for a few weeks. Sure enough, the baby’s timing meant that Gershon was confronted with making an impromptu debut.

“My first performance with an orchestra was on two hours’ notice. I got the call at 6:15 for an 8 o’clock concert,” he says. “That was about the most terrifying experience I could possibly imagine, up until the downbeat. When the orchestra started playing, and they really played very beautifully that night, that was one of those truly unforgettable experiences.”

Salonen points to Gershon’s “quick and flexible” mind as a prerequisite for such moments. Gershon credits Salonen with a “tremendous gift for the communication of the conducting art.”

Eventually, Gershon was named assistant conductor of the Philharmonic, leading subscription concerts in 1995 and 1996 and making his Hollywood Bowl debut in 1997.

Then, in 1998, he and his wife, soprano Elissa Johnston, moved to New York City, a better base for a career that looked increasingly to companies and festivals in Europe and on the East Coast. By the time the Master Chorale came calling, he had another offer on the table: an assistant conductorship with Daniel Barenboim at the Unter den Linden opera company in Berlin.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale was founded in 1962 by Roger Wagner. After a Highland fling with Scottish chorus master John Currie, it was led for the last 10 years by Paul Salamunovich, who returned it to Wagner’s sonic ideals, brought in Morten Lauridsen as composer-in-residence and recorded three CDs on RCM, the latest just released.

The chorale has always performed regularly with the Philharmonic, which is how Gershon made his first professional connection with the organization. In 1993, he prepared the women of the chorale for performances of Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Clocks and Clouds,” with Salonen and the Philharmonic.

“That was one of those scores, you open it up and it looks like hell, chicken scratches everywhere. It was in Ligeti’s own handwriting and almost indecipherable. Looking back, I was probably the only person around town foolish enough to say, ‘Sure, I’ll teach that to the chorale.’

“The chorale covered itself in glory that performance. That’s when I first realized the depth of the talent pool here and the degree of musical sophistication of the best singers in town.”

He would again coach the chorale for other programs, including returning to L.A. after moving to New York in 1998 to prepare the ensemble for a performances of Ligeti’s Requiem with the Philharmonic.

Such assignments made Gershon familiar to the chorale, and when Salamunovich announced his impending retirement in 1999, Gershon had an immediate spot among the prospective successors. Not that this was a very exclusive position, as the initial list had well over 400 names on it.

“This was a long process, probably an 18-month, worldwide search,” says Mark Foster, president of the Master Chorale board of directors. “We got down to a serious working list in the neighborhood of 20 names, then brought that down to about four.

“We unanimously selected Grant; I think Grant is clearly the most complete musician of all we looked at.”

When the offer was made, the chorale was aware that Berlin was interested as well. What it came down to, says Gershon, was the artistic level of the Master Chorale’s singers and the stature of the organization. Above all, there was the chance to chart an important organization’s future--”to reconsider,” says Gershon, “everything that the Master Chorale does.”

The goal he set is simple: “Every concert needs to be a major event, not only for the audience, but for the singers as well.”

He has in mind increasing the chorale’s local and national presence--scheduling performances outside the Music Center, creating new subset ensembles, touring and recording--and closer collaboration with other groups, including an already launched multiyear project with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the hope of producing festivals with the Philharmonic in Disney Hall. And then there are his expanded ideas about repertory, represented by such works as “Itaipu.”

“There is such a tremendous renaissance happening right now in terms of composers writing for chorus,” Gershon says. “Adams, Ligeti, Gorecki, Arvo Prt--the list just goes on and on.

“I’m so excited about the opportunity to present new music in a dynamic balance with the standard repertoire, where the more familiar music casts a new level of illumination on the unfamiliar music, and vice versa.”

Toward that end, this season he has matched Gorecki’s Miserere with Mozart’s Requiem, and Renaissance madrigals with the world premiere of USC composer Donald Crockett’s “Broken Charms.” There is the U.S. premiere of a piece by Salonen and one by Ligeti, but also Bach’s Magnificat and Handel’s mighty “Israel in Egypt.”

Gershon’s expansion plans mean that, for now, he is concentrating almost exclusively on the Master Chorale, which is unusual in an era of peripatetic conductors. He, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter have moved back to Southern California, the better to maintain that focus.

“I will remain very selective about the work I do away,” Gershon says, “We’ve got a three-year plan in terms of programs, and we do want to expand our season, particularly when we get into Disney Hall.”

It’s two weeks before the Master Chorale’s season opener and the ensemble is making an unexpected appearance. As many singers as can have joined Gershon in the atrium of the Central Library for a noontime concert in memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“It was just the right thing to do,” he will say later. “The Master Chorale should have a leadership position in the community, as well as on the musical stage.”

The singers take their places deep in the well of the open, multistory space. Without comment or announcement, they begin a mass composed by William Byrd.

The surrounding tiers and balconies fill with listeners; others, using the escalators, add a rising and falling human counterpoint to the circulating swell of Renaissance polphony.

Gershon is conducting, in casual black punctuated by a small red-white-and-blue ribbon. He bends with the music, seeming to shape not just the sounds but a living space for them as well--and perhaps, a new place for the Master Chorale in Los Angeles. *

The Los Angeles Master Chorale season continues through June. It’s next performance, “Cantos Sagrados,” is November 17, at the Pasadena United Methodist Church. Information: (213) 972-7282.