Duo Chorales Elevate Sacred Verses at UCLA

Composed in 1933, Ernest Bloch’s “Avodath Hakodesh” (Sacred Service) brings the majesty and beauty of Hebrew sacred texts out of the synagogue and into the concert hall.

The five-part work, which ranges from the gentle to the sublime, from the assertive to the mystical, made a mighty impact Saturday in UCLA’s Royce Hall as Donald Neuen led the combined UCLA and Angeles chorales and the American Youth Symphony.

If any complaint could be raised, it would be that Neuen and the 200 voices of the combined chorales fell into the “loud is better” syndrome, equating relentlessly high decibels with deep conviction. Nathan Lam, cantor of Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel-Air, was the authoritative baritone soloist.

The program opened with the world premiere of Steve Rothstein’s Psalm 27, a 14-minute rhapsodic, urgent setting of verses from this text. The work is expansive and rich but never cloying. Rothstein is a graduate student in composition at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Chorale. Duana Demus, a doctoral student in voice at UCLA, was the cautious, sometimes taxed soprano soloist in the demanding, wide-lying part.

For the midpoint offering, Thea Kano, assistant conductor of the Angeles Chorale and a graduate student in choral conducting at UCLA, led a squarish account of Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” Daniel McGrew, a third-grader at the Crystal Cathedral Academy for the Arts, was the poised boy soprano soloist.