Lauridsen Choral Works – Salamunovich

Some choral discs announce themselves with a fanfare. This one creeps up on you — a whispered entrance, a slow tightening in the chest — and by the time “O Magnum Mysterium” arrives, five and a half minutes from the finish, you understand why that piece has become something like a modern Christmas standard in choir lofts from Pasadena to Providence. Paul Salamunovich and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the ensemble for whom Morten Lauridsen has essentially written his entire choral career, give us a portrait of a composer who has quietly become one of the most performed choral voices of his generation.

Lauridsen resists easy pigeonholing. He is not a minimalist, though the slow harmonic rhythm and the long, arching phrases sometimes suggest Arvo Pärt at his most tintinnabular. He is not really a populist either, though there’s a directness to his melodic writing that has made him beloved by community choirs and cathedral choirs alike. Lauridsen deserves better than the Rutter comparison that gets trotted out reflexively. Rutter writes charming, well-crafted music for church and holiday use; Lauridsen, at his best, writes music that aspires to something closer to the sustained devotional intensity of Duruflé, or even, in its harmonic saturation, to late Fauré.

Lux Aeterna, receiving its first release here, makes the strongest case. Lauridsen has said the piece emerged from personal grief, and its debt to the Brahms Requiem is not stylistic but architectural — that same instinct to open in low, hushed sonority before allowing the light in gradually. The five movements — “Introitus,” “In Te Domine Speravi,” “O Nata Lux,” “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” “Agnus Dei — Lux Aeterna” — trace a Requiem‘s emotional arc without adopting its full liturgical text. The choral writing throughout favors long suspensions that resolve just late enough to feel earned rather than sentimental. The Sinfonia Orchestra plays with translucent, chamber-scaled restraint. Nothing is inflated here.

The chorus itself is the real instrument on this disc. This is a choir trained in the old Roger Wagner tradition — Salamunovich sang under Wagner for decades before inheriting the group — and you hear that lineage in the seamless blend, the absence of obtrusive vibrato, the way sopranos float above the texture rather than piercing through it. In “O Nata Lux” the tuning is immaculate in a way that some starrier British cathedral choirs, for all their polish, sometimes fail to match. There’s an unforced warmth here that never curdles into blandness.

Les Chansons des Roses, Rilke settings from 1993, occupy different terrain — secular, sensuous, French (Rilke wrote these particular poems in French himself, a lesser-known corner of his output). The closing “Dirait-on,” with its gently swaying piano ostinato, has practically escaped the confines of this cycle to become an audition staple and a wedding favorite. Deservedly so. Hearing it in context, though, following the astringent harmonies of “Contre qui, rose,” you appreciate its release all the more.

Ave Maria, a birthday gift for the director, unfolds with the kind of serene confidence that suggests Lauridsen knew exactly the sound this choir could produce and wrote directly to it. It is not an ambitious piece. It doesn’t need to be.

The Mid-Winter Songs, heard here in their final 1990 orchestral dress, set Robert Graves texts that most listeners will not know — part of the pleasure, three-quarters of the way through a disc that could easily have coasted. The orchestration adds color without cluttering, though I still prefer the leaner original piano version for its intimacy; the orchestral upholstery, however tastefully applied, softens some of the rhythmic bite in the outer movements.

And then “O Magnum Mysterium” itself, unaccompanied, five minutes of the purest choral writing on the disc. The parallel harmonies at “et admirabile sacramentum” still catch you by surprise no matter how many times you’ve heard the piece on Christmas radio, half-attentively, the way I did. Heard whole, in context, it justifies its reputation.

Sound engineering, done across four sessions in the Sacred Heart Chapel at Loyola Marymount, captures a warm, cushioned acoustic without smearing diction — no small feat with this much reverberant tail. If you already own the Polyphony/Layton or the Kansas City Chorale recordings of individual Lauridsen works, this disc still earns its place: these are the forces and the room the composer had in his ear the whole time.