• 1970-01-01

An “Intoxicating Performance”: Reviews of Our Season Opener

Our 2019-20 season opener Bruckner's Great Mass received praise from several news outlets.  

It’s becoming a common occurrence—and one we never take for granted—for the Los Angeles Master Chorale to get rave reviews. This past summer, our singers took the Salzburg Festival by storm, enjoying standing ovations and critical plaudits from outlets such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which called the festival-opening performances of Lagrime di San Pietro “painfully beautiful” (Schmerzlich schön).

Yesterday, our hometown Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Classical Voice, which is becoming a reliable source of information on classical music in Southern California, published reviews of last weekend’s season opening performance of Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F Minor and Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana. Both had great things to say, particularly on Oceana.

In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed called the Golijov, which featured the Brazilian jazz singer Luciana Souza, an “intoxicating performance” that belies the challenges of the music:
“The score looks impossibly difficult,” writes Swed. “But everything sounded natural, the ear following the rhythmic waves just as the eye follows the oceans at the beach.”

Richard S. Ginell, writing for the San Francisco Classical Voice, noted that the Master Chorale had never before performed either work on this unusual pairing, but praised “the enterprise to tackle two major works that these skilled singers and players had never performed before … both came off splendidly.”

Photos from our October 20 performance of the Bruckner and Golijov are on Facebook now. Take a look.