Recording – Choir’s First on Decca and Slated for Fall 2010 Release – to Feature Six Works Conducted by Music Director Grant Gershon: Expecting the Main Things from You, Bright Mass with Canons, First Service, A Good Understanding, Senex Puerum Portabat, and Like As the Hart

Decca Music Group and the acclaimed Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC), under the artistic leadership of Music Director Grant Gershon, have announced a new recording partnership beginning with the release in Fall 2010 of an all-Nico Muhly CD – entitled “A Good Understanding” – which the Chorale will record at Walt Disney Concert Hall on June 10 and 11, 2010. Gershon, who is embarking on his tenth season at the choir’s helm, will conduct six works by the noted American composer, who the Chicago Tribune states, “has something to say and a smart, sassy, in-your-face way of saying it.” Three are pieces previously given West Coast premieres by the Chorale, including Expecting the Main Things from You, a three-movement work for organ and string quartet, performed by the choir in February 2009; and Bright Mass with Canons, which pairs ancient music techniques with a minimalist bent, and First Service, composed in 2004, both of which were highlighted by the chorus in its January 2010 concert. Also included on the recording are A Good Understanding and Senex Puerum Portabat. Like As the Hart will be featured as an iTunes bonus track.

Accompanying the Los Angeles Master Chorale on various tracks will be leading organist Kimo Smith, the superlative Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, a string quartet, a brass octet, and a trio of percussionists.

This marks the Chorale’s first recording with the prestigious Decca Classics label. It is also the first time Decca has released a CD recorded in the internationally acclaimed concert hall designed by architect Frank Gehry and hailed by critics for its sparkling acoustics.

“We’re very excited about our new partnership with this important international label and are particularly pleased to showcase the music of gifted young composer Nico Muhly,” says LAMC Executive Director Terry Knowles.

"Nico Muhly is a brilliantly eclectic composer whose tastes (much like my own) run the gamut from William Byrd to Björk, with many, many detours in transit,” states Gershon. “Nico's music is honest and sly, transcendent and earthy, radiant and austere. He writes beautifully for the voice, and his music springs off of the page with grace and unbuttoned joy. I am thrilled to be making the first major label recording of Nico's brilliant choral works, and I am especially pleased that the Los Angeles Master Chorale is creating this recording with the legendary Decca label. The partnership between Decca and the Master Chorale is a natural fit and holds exciting promise for the future."

"We are thrilled to be working with the Los Angeles Master Chorale,” said Paul Moseley, General Manager of Decca. “Under Grant Gershon the group has established itself as a premier chorus with innovative programming that presents important works by contemporary composers. Decca is delighted that our first disc with LAMC focuses on the choral music of Nico Muhly. His original yet accessible music continues in the line of Decca’s historical connections with composers such as Benjamin Britten, Michael Torke and Mark-Anthony Turnage."

The New York Times states, “There is no easy label to hang on Nico Muhly, a 29-year-old Juilliard-trained composer in New York. His music -- typically small, elegant parcels filled with clear melodies, pulsating rhythms and the occasional alarming abrasion -- has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and prominent international halls. Vibrant, erudite and endlessly irreverent, Mr. Muhly sees no reason to ally himself with any particular stylistic camp.” Muhly has collaborated with such artists as Björk, Phillip Glass and American folk singer Sam Amidon.

The Grammy-nominated Los Angeles Master Chorale – a resident company of the Music Center – is recognized as one of the city’s cultural treasures and one of the world’s premier choruses. The Los Angeles Times proclaims, “Under Gershon, the Master Chorale seems to be able to master anything.” The respected arts blog CultureSpotLA, echoing that sentiment, further adds, “The Master Chorale is not just any ensemble – it is the nation’s, and maybe the world’s, most innovative choral group, thriving under its vibrant music director, Grant Gershon.” Cited as a national leader for its innovative and dynamic programming and its commitment to commissioning new works, the Chorale has earned the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming three times – in 1995, 2003 and 2010. The Decca CD will be the Chorale’s fourth recording under Gershon’s baton.

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Featured Works

Expecting the Main Things From You, set to three poems by Walt Whitman and called “melodious” by the Pasadena Star News, was written for choir, string quartet, percussion and organ, and premiered in 2005. In describing the work, the Los Angeles Times states “selections from Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ are first broken into choral fragments, then backed by a hazy series of Minimalist textures.” Muhly explains that the work “begins with a series of exchanges between the choir and ensemble, defining the harmonic progressions that make up the first movement. Each movement of Expecting ends with a series of wordless pulses, a sort of musical punctuation. If the first and third poems reference the political urgency of the city, the second movement is a pastoral interlude. Accordingly, the percussion parts in this movement are built around three expanding and contracting rhythms in the woodblock, tam-tam, and vibraphone. Three quarters of the choir sings a stylized Morse code (I was inspired by watching satellites pass overhead in the middle of the woods in Vermont; the now-omnipresent invisible haze of technology even in the fields), while some sopranos and altos overlay long, endless lines. The third movement is the most urgent and the most aggressive in its patterns: I wanted to reinforce Whitman’s movement from the general to the very specific and accusatory second person of the end of the poem. A series of expanding and contracting rhythms and another wordless pulse brings the piece to a quiet close.”

Pairing ancient music techniques with a minimalist bent, Muhly wrote the reverent Bright Mass with Canons in 1995 for the choir of St. Thomas Church in New York City. Gershon says, “It takes the purity of the Anglican tradition of choral music and gives it a modern veneer, making it clearly of the here and now.”

First Service was composed by Muhly in 2004 and premiered the same year at Girton College in Cambridge University in England. Describing the work, Muhly states, “The Magnificat features an anxious two-note octave in the organ, nervously twitching in anticipation. The Nunc Dimittis (which is one of my favorite things written in the English language) starts slowly, and then focuses all of its energy towards the beginning of the Gloria Patri, a New Testament harmonic culling of everything that has come before it.”

Muhly penned A Good Understanding, which was premiered in 2005, for Tim Brown and the choir of Clare College, Cambridge. Says Muhly, “The piece unfolds episodically – short choral phrases alternating with longer instrumental interludes. The first half of the text is typical psaltry praise making: outlining agreements, explaining the rules; the music is, accordingly, severe but practical. The second half of the text begins, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom / a good understanding have all they that do his commandments.’ I find the idea of ‘a good understanding’ to be an especially exciting reward for following the rules; the boys sing pulsed syllables and long descants to celebrate the covenant while the choir sings a lilting, repetitive refrain.”

Senex Puerum Portabat, for brass and voices, was a commission by the Guggenheim Museum for its performing arts series “Works & Process.” A new “edition” of the Byrd piece of the same name, it is a nod to the composer’s Anglican choirboy roots. Muhly notes, “My basic scheme was that the first part was a series of pulses anchoring the texture, and then at the second part, we encounter an ecstatic brass band which then explodes into free-form speaking-in-tongues at ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo.’ ”

Like as the Hart, composed in 2004 for violin, percussion and voice, was first performed in May of that year by the VOX Ensemble conducted by George Steel as part of the MATA Festival, New York. The composer writes, ”Like as the Hart is my response to Herbert Howells's more famous setting of this Psalm paraphrase. I have always been obsessed with the length of Howells's melodies and the way that the harmonies trail behind the tunes like halos. In my version, I invert this relationship, with massive elongated harmonies dragging melodic fragments behind them. I arranged the harmonies in a large arch form with shrinking and expanding rhythms on either side of the central point (on the word 'God.')”

About Composer Nico Muhly

Born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, New York-based composer NICO MUHLY graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004 he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School, where he studied under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. A former boy chorister, Muhly has composed extensively for choir, including commissions from the Clare College Choir and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. New York’s Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue commissioned and performed his Bright Mass with Canons, later recorded on their American Voices CD. His orchestral works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra (It Remains to Be Seen, a 2006 commission celebrating their 40th anniversary), the Boston Pops (Wish You Were Here), the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony (Step Team). Film credits include Muhly's scores for Joshua (2007), Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and the Argentine drama Felicitas, and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects. With designer/illustrator Maira Kalman, Muhly composed a vocal work based on Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, and he has worked with choreographer Benjamin Millepied to create new pieces for the American Theater (From Here On Out) and the Paris Opéra ballet (Triade), as well as for the Nederlands Ballet’s 2010–2011 season. His 2009 collaboration with American choreographer Stephen Petronio (I Drink the Air Before Me) was presented at the Joyce Theater in New York and will be remounted at the Barbican Centre in London in 2010. Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger, and conductor to other musicians, including Antony and the Johnsons (The Crying Light), Sam Amidon (All is Well, I See the Sign), Björk (Medúlla, Drawing Restraint 9, Volta), Bonnie "Prince" Billy (The Letting Go), Doveman (The Conformist), Grizzly Bear (Veckatimest), and Jónsi from Sigur Rós (Go). Muhly co-composed 14 songs with Faroese singer Teitur Lassen (Confessions), and presented them in a week of concerts with the Holland Baroque society. Among his most frequent collaborators are his colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release of Muhly's first album, Speaks Volumes (2007). Leading up to Speaks Volumes’ American release, Muhly was invited to present concerts of his chamber music at both Carnegie Hall and the Whitney Museum. Since then, Muhly has released a second album, Mothertongue (2008), and worked closely with label mates Valgeir, Ben Frost, and Sam Amidon on their respective solo releases. Valgeir collaborated with Muhly and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel to create the "scent opera" Green Aria (2009), which premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Carnegie Hall commissioned his song The Adulteress for soprano Jessica Rivera's 2009 Carnegie debut, and that same year, countertenor David Daniels and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performed his Vocalise and Drones on arias by Handel. 2010 saw the premiere of a new orchestral song cycle for tenor Mark Padmore, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and the Britten Sinfonia. Muhly's first full-scale opera, with a libretto by Craig Lucas, has been co-commissioned by the English National Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and Lincoln Center Theater Commissions Program.

About the Artists

GRANT GERSHON, now entering his 10th season as music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, has garnered tremendous critical acclaim during his tenure with the renowned chorus. The Los Angeles Times proclaims that the Chorale "has become the most exciting chorus in the country under Grant Gershon." During his tenure with the Chorale he has led over 75 performances at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, including virtually all of the major choral works. Also well known as a champion of new music, Gershon has led world premiere performances of works by John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Christopher Rouse, Steve Reich, and Chinary Ung among many others. His discography includes two Grammy Award-nominated recordings: Sweeney Todd (New York Philharmonic Special Editions) and Ligeti’s Grand Macabre (Sony Classical); as well as three CDs with the Chorale: Glass-Salonen (RCM), You Are (Variations) (Nonesuch) and Daniel Variations (Nonesuch). In New York he has appeared on the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center and on the Making Music series at Zankel Hall. Other major appearances include performances at the Ravinia, Aspen, Edinburgh, Helsinki and Vienna Festivals. He has worked closely with many leading conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, Gustavo Dudamel, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In 2007, Gershon conducted the Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera The Grapes of Wrath, which was recorded live for PS Classics. In 2009, he made his highly acclaimed Los Angeles Opera debut leading eight performances of Verdi’s La Traviata. In September 2010, Gershon will lead the world premiere performances at LA Opera of Daniel Catán’s Il Postino featuring Plácido Domingo, and he will make his Santa Fe Opera debut in 2011, conducting Peter Sellars’ new production of Vivaldi’s Griselda. Gershon was recently named Outstanding Alumnus of the USC Thornton School of Music and is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Thornton School and the Board of Directors of Chorus America.

Giving a voice to Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Grammy-nominated LOS ANGELES MASTER CHORALE (LAMC), founded in 1964, It is led by Music Director Grant Gershon, who in 2010|11 celebrates celebrates his 10th Anniversary season with the renowned choir and also serves as associate conductor/chorus master of the LA Opera. The Chorale is currently in its 47th season as a resident company of the Music Center of Los Angeles County and its 8th as the resident chorus at Disney Hall. In addition to presenting its own concert series each year, the Chorale has performed in more than 280 concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at both Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and has also appeared at the Ojai Festival, the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center, and at Overture Center in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as at leading venues throughout the Southland. The Chorale has presented more than 480 concerts, including choral music from the earliest writings to the most recent contemporary compositions. It has commissioned 25 and premiered 63 new works, of which 41 were world premieres, and has been awarded the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming three times – in 1995, 2003 and 2010. The LA Master Chorale has recorded three CDs under Gershon’s baton, including Daniel Variations by Steve Reich, released in spring 2008 on Nonesuch Records, You Are (Variations) by Steve Reich, released in September 2005 on Nonesuch Records, and an RCM recording featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first choral work, Two Songs to Poems of Ann Jäderlund, and Philip Glass’ Itaipu. In June 2010, Gershon conducts the choir in recording sessions at Disney Hall for his fourth CD with the choir, the all-Nico Muhly album described above. LAMC previously released three CDs under Music Director Emeritus Paul Salamunovich on RCM, including the Grammy-nominated Lauridsen-Lux Aeterna. The Chorale is also featured with Gershon on the soundtracks of such major motion pictures as Charlie Wilson’s War, Lady in the Water, License to Wed, and Waterworld. The Los Angeles Master Chorale has more than 1,000 subscribers, serves over 40,000 audience members of all ages, and provides education outreach to approximately 6,000 children each year. In 2008, the Chorale’s highly successful outreach program “Voices Within” earned the coveted Chorus America Education Outreach Award.

KIMO SMITH organist and collaborative pianist, began music studies in his home state of Hawaii at age four. Following his graduation from Hawaiian Mission Academy, he attended the University of Hawaii, La Sierra University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles. A student of Ladd Thomas at USC, he completed his Bachelor and Master degrees, magna cum laude, in organ performance. He was selected to receive the Organ Department Outstanding Achievement Award on both occasions. He completed his doctoral studies at UCLA in organ performance as a student of Thomas Harmon. Dr. Smith is a past winner of several competitions sponsored by the American Guild of Organists and Music Teachers National Association. Dr. Smith is currently Associate Professor of Music at La Sierra University, where he is chair of the Department of Music. He is an active recitalist, performing locally, nationally, and abroad. As organist, he has appeared as a guest artist with several Southern California orchestras and choral ensembles, including the Glendale Symphony, Riverside County Philharmonic Orchestra, William Hall Chorale, and Los Angeles Master Chorale. He has also been consistently involved in church music since he was twelve, and is the organist at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and the University Church of Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda. His professional music activities also include a great deal of collaborative performing which has taken him throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia with touring groups and solo artists.

LOS ANGELES CHILDREN’S CHORUS – described as “astonishingly polished,” “hauntingly beautiful,” “a homogenous blanket of sound that is smooth, silky” and “one heck of a talented group of kids” – is recognized throughout the country for its exceptional artistic quality and technical ability. Under Artistic Director Anne Tomlinson, LACC is recognized throughout the country for its exceptional artistic quality and technical ability. Founded in 1986, LACC performs frequently with leading music ensembles including the LA Phil, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Calder Quartet and Pasadena Symphony. LACC also assists Los Angeles Opera by training and providing children for its opera productions that require children’s chorus or child soloists. The Chorus’ roster includes more than 350 children aged 6-18 from 60 communities across Los Angeles in six choirs and a program of “First Experiences in Singing” classes for young singers. LACC’s intensive training program includes weekly or twice weekly rehearsals, individual vocal coaching and comprehensive musicianship classes. LACC has toured Brazil, Great Britain, Italy, Australia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, as well as many parts of the United States and Canada. In 2008, Concert Choir performed at the China International Arts Celebration for Young People during its tour to China prior to the Beijing summer Olympics. Among its numerous accomplishments, LACC produced a commissioned world-premiere opera, Keepers of the Night, by composer Peter Ash and librettist Donald Sturrock in 2007 and appears on "Amore Infinito" ("Infinite Love"), a Deutsche Grammophon CD of songs based on poems by the late Pope John Paul II and performed by Plácido Domingo, which was released worldwide in March 2009. LACC is also featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, “Sing!” and sequel documentary “Sing Opera!” by award-winning Santa Monica filmmakers Freida Lee Mock and Jessica Sanders. “Sing!” documents a year in the life of the choir and is shown frequently on PBS stations nationwide. “Sing China!,” a third documentary premiering in spring 2009, chronicles the choir’s groundbreaking tour to China. LACC has appeared twice on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” including, in June 2009, with Grammy Award-winning pop artist John Mayer, and was featured on Public Radio International’s acclaimed nationally syndicated radio show “From the Top,” hosted by acclaimed pianist Christopher O’Riley. On a local outreach level, LACC continues its long-standing commitment to the community by partnering with Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA!) and Pasadena’s Daniel Webster Elementary School, as well as many other community-based organizations.

About Decca Music Group

Decca Music Group is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its US label was established in 1934; after World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades. It is noted for its development of recording methods in the United Kingdom and for the development of original cast albums in the United States. Both wings are now part of Universal Music Group which is owned by Vivendi, a media conglomerate headquartered in France. Today, Decca is a label of great diversity, home to many of the world’s most distinguished artists. Its classical division Decca Classics is home to an array of the greatest stars such as Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli, Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming, Juan Diego Florez and Jonas Kaufmann.

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06/21/10