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All Together Now . . . The Meaning of Ensemble

The Los Angeles Master Chorale

Photo by David Johnston

To fully absorb the meaning of “ensemble” in the theater, the Los Angeles Master Chorale must be experienced. Last week at Disney Hall, conducted by artistic director Grant Gershon, a comparatively small acappella chorus of 36 performed sacred music from the Renaissance, featuring works by Thomas Tallis, John Taverner, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Josquin des Prez, William Byrd, Orlando di Lasso and, as part of an encore, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. (Associate conductor Lesley Leighton led des Prez’s Ave nobilissima creatura in the second half.)

(Excerpts in archived podcasts from the concert can be found on the right side of LAMC’s link.)

The black-clad singers stood at arms length distance in elliptical rows, holding their music before them in binders. Tenors, bases altos and sopranos stood in their respective vocal sections. But Gershon not only conducted, he choreographed the singers so that, mid-song, one individual would wander down an otherwise static position to meet a partner for a duet (a tenor with a soprano, for example), and then return to re-join his or her vocal compatriots as the piece continued. Gershon used flamboyant hand-signals to direct all of his singers to park on chairs lining the back of the stage while he, taking center stage, offered the introduction of some new selection or section – for example, pointing out the difference between a block chord composition and the individuation of voices in an upcoming series of motets.

Grant Gershon: Photo by Steven Cohn

Perhaps it’s a component of the era being honored, but individual voices, singing usually in duets, were unostentatious, unadorned and slightly wispy. When calibrated in unison, however, the sounds – whether in those block chords, or in fugue-like juxtapositions – were as one. It’s that calibration that evoked the evening’s often sublime musicality: passages rendered en masse in prolonged pianissimo – the grandeur of softness, so foreign to our era – terminating with 36 voices coming to a halt at precisely the same instant.

Latin verse was super-titled into English, underscoring Gershon’s description of the liturgy as dogma. He explained that there was some consideration of not using supertitles, in order to allow the glory of the sounds to speak music’s more universal language. But then we would have missed verses such as “Thou, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us . . . Grant us peace” (from Taverner’s Western Wind Mass – Gloria/Agnus Dei.) Is there any situation involving human beings, in any corner of the planet, where that verse doesn’t apply?

The Los Angeles Master Chorale performs resident composer Morten Lauridesen’s O Magnum Mysterium — the most widely performed contemporary choral work — on Sunday, December 14 at Disney Hall.

One of the maxims floating around the discussion of ensembles is how even solo performances are ensembles, since they can’t be performed without a director (assuming the performer is not the director), or a stage-manager, or lighting/sound designers/operators. (Technically, they can, but generally they aren’t.) All of these people need to work together to create the performance, so why can’t an ensemble consist of one actor plus designers and technicians? Are they not on the same team? Wouldn’t this argument make our Hollywood Fringe, with its overwhelming majority of solo performances, a cauldron of ensemble work?

This reasoning throws the very meaning and purpose of ensemble down a rabbit hole – at least, if one determines that ensemble is somehow related to voice, and voice is related to vision.

Marissa Chibas in Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary: Photo by Steven Gunther

In the recently-closed Latino theater festival, Encuentro 2014 at Los Angeles Theatre Center, Marissa Chibas’s solo performance about her dad, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary (her father, Raul Chibas, co-authored Fidel Castro’s manifesto on democracy in Cuba, then fled after advising Castro to adhere to the tenets of that manifesto), the piece’s sardonic, bemused view stemmed from the performer’s story, her facial expressions and the cadences of her narrative, and how they all floated in the vapors of memory, and of history. The vision came from the performer’s soul, a direct line from actor to audience. Ditto writer-performer Ruben C. Gonzalez’s La Esquinita, USA, (Also in Encuentro 2014) in which Gonzales flitted among portrayals of various denizens of a fictitious, economically abandoned American city. There may have been numerous characters, but they all arrived from that same line of connection between one actor and one audience.

From the spectator’s perspective, this a very different experience from the way the visions behind Latino Theatre Company’s Premeditation (Evelina Fernandez’s four-character comedy, in Encuentro 2014) and Pacific Resident Theatre’s excellent The Cherry Orchard (recently closed, in Venice) were propelled. That propulsion came from the plays themselves, from the very dramaturgy of Fernandez’s farce, and of Anton Chekhov’s atmospheric comedy-drama. The idea behind “ensemble” is almost as old as the ancient Greek dramas, as old as the idea that drama consists of taking in one character’s point-of-view, and then taking in a contradicting point-of-view, so that the truth, the view, the vision, derives from the melding of “voices.” No single character in a great ensemble, or a great multiple-character play, expresses the play’s point-of-view. That view arrives when a number of sometimes contrary voices eventually blend into a kind of harmony.

Last week’s concert by L.A. Master Chorale was a tribute to that idea.

For information on Los Angeles Master Chorale’s upcoming concerts, visit https:lamc.org