MUSIC : Currie Leads Chorale With an Ear to the Future

In many ways, John Currie measures the present by what is to come. When caught between rehearsals, the music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale is not at all obsessed with immediate activities. Just finishing the second season of a five-year contract, Currie’s plans and conversation already range ahead into his next contract.

Not that the affable Scot is not busy or concerned with current events. Currie is deep in rehearsals for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which the Chorale sings Saturday at the Music Center, and next month comes the final program of the season, pairing the Requiems by Mozart and Faure.

But in some ways, the Music Center concerts are just the public tip of the Master Chorale iceberg. Behind them lie a mass of quotidian chores, hard artistic decisions and simmering discontent, and Currie goes about his manifold labors with an ear to the future.

“I really came, and I’m still here, determined to make a long, slow plan for the Chorale,” he says. “I liked the look of the job here--the personalities and village politics aside, because it’s not awfully fruitful to ponder that--because I could see the potential for a truly rounded job here.”

Among his activities Currie can count preparing the Master Chorale for engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, contracting the chorus for Music Center Opera productions, the Chorale’s own concert series, and numerous appearances which Currie classifies, broadly and importantly, as outreach.

“We have to go out there and grab our audience. In the five years before I got here, there was a steady decline in audience figures. That is fact,” Currie asserts.

“We are, in a very modest way, on an upturn as far as attendence is concerned, and as far as subscribers are concerned. There has been a 15% increase on last year, and last year was a small increase on the year before.”

Outreach, for Currie, can involve anything from his own presentations to members of the blossoming Master Chorale support groups, to small ensembles from the Chorale visiting area schools. The school programs, lead by Dale Jergenson as he did under Roger Wagner’s tenure, have been doubled this year, through a grant from El Paso Gas Co.

“I just don’t see the thing succeeding,” Currie muses, “unless we are doing an educative process, unless I am out there talking to those women’s groups and youth groups.”

When Currie is not “out there,” advocating, rehearsing and performing choral music, he is home in a hillside house in Encino. “Yes, Los Angeles is home now,” Currie says. “We kept a small weekend cottage in Scotland, but we’re never there.”

“We” includes wife Anna, a former singer, and now Currie’s personal manager and business partner. Both have grown-up families by previous marriages. The couple will be back in Scotland in May, however, when Currie makes his debut as a stage director, setting “Cosi fan Tutte”--which he will also conduct--for the Perth Festival.

Currie, 53, once was the veritable mogul of Scottish choral music, directing all the major choral organizations in his native land. Now, he retains only a regular connection with the Edinburgh International Festival, having made a commitment to the “truly rounded job” that he saw here.

Rounded the job may be, but it hasn’t lacked the hard edge of controversy, either. Currie arrived on wings of contention, amid much public and private choro-political debate about the deposition of Master Chorale founder Roger Wagner.

“I was aware that there was a difficult transition prior to my arrival, and that it would continue to be difficult,” Currie says. “The whole world knew that there had been only one musical chief of the Master Chorale before me, and that was a situation that required a great deal of thought before coming.

“I came on the assumption that after some years, things will be normal here, in the sense that they were not normal before I came, and when I first arrived.”

One of the first things that Currie did was audition singers, about 500 of them. His reconstruction of the celebrated chorus produced its own measure of public acrimony, and welding an artistic consensus within the Chorale itself remains a long-term concern for Currie.

“It’s always a challenge to begin a slow process of growth with your colleagues the singers,” says Currie. “I wish there was a quick way of doing that. You know, the very first night that I rehearsed the Chorale, we had a very immediate friendship, which has continued and has deepened.

“But the process of having that very special relationship, where there are things that don’t need to be said in rehearsal and where the artistic aims are common, is quite slow.

“I would say that probably the main challenge to that here is that these are singers who are singing all over the city in other places. A singer who is going to get the full experience from the Master Chorale is going to be a singer who hasn’t got what I would call the ‘gig mentality,’ but who is looking for a unique artistic product.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that our singers should not be singing all over the city. I welcome that. The more work they can get, the better. But I think we have made a breakthrough, in the sense that Chorale singers do not come to rehearsal now thinking, ‘This is a 2 1/2-hour session for X dollars.’ . . . They are looking for a distinctive artistic product.”

Not all members of the Master Chorale, however, are happy with what they have found. Some, including singers new to the Chorale since Currie’s advent, have begun a campaign of calling board members to express their dissatisfaction with what they consider uninspiring leadership in concert.

Abbott Brown, president of the executive committee, acknowledges the discontent. “I have talked with some Chorale members. Any time you have a large organization, you have different opinions. We are listening to everybody, but we realize you can’t please 125 people all of the time.”

(Chorale members declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Currie does seem to be pleasing those he needs to most, however, such as the Master Chorale board. “We’re very supportive of John,” Brown says.

The Master Chorale frequently appears with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Andre Previn, music director of the Philharmonic, is also happy with the work Currie has done, and looks forward to further major collaborations next season, such as the Brahms Requiem.

“I’ve known John since he did the Edinburgh Festival,” Previn says. “It was terrific to get him here. I find that the (Chorale’s) preparation is wonderful.”

Currie, in turn, indicates a complete willingness to accommodate the Philharmonic in matters of scheduling and repertory. “We’re really guest artists with the Philharmonic. It’s a long association, and seems to be a successful relationship at the moment.”

The Master Chorale’s relationship with Music Center Opera is more mundane, as simply a source of chorus singers. Currie selects--but does not rehearse, by his own choosing--the opera chorus.

The majority of the opera chorus is drawn from the Master Chorale ranks, when the opera dates do not conflict with other Chorale obligations. The current “Mikado” production, for example, competes with the Chorale’s St. Matthew performance and rehearsals, so MCO has recruited its own chorus for “Mikado.”

MCO officials acknowledge that eventually the company wants to form its own regular chorus. But through next season, at least, they say the relationship with the Master Chorale will continue.

The Master Chorale is weathering what Currie describes as “a very severe financial crisis.” It first became publicly apparent last month, when the Master Chorale abruptly canceled its new Nakamichi Concerts series, supported in part by the E. Nakamichi Foundation, after just two of the scheduled five programs were performed.

That series, which featured back-to-back performances of programs for smaller forces at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach and the Japan America Theatre downtown, was another element of Currie’s outreach planning. Its cancellation was deeply regretted by everyone.

The fiscal woes have also made reductions in the size of the Chorale and supporting Sinfonia necessary for the final concerts of the Music Center season. “We felt it was prudent to make some cutbacks,” Brown says.

These reductions have not surprisingly lowered morale in the Chorale, and Currie attributes much of the criticism that singers have been voicing about him to board members to this atmosphere. “In times of financial difficulty, this is a general symptom,” he says. “I told the board, ‘If we make these cuts, then we have to deal with the disappointments.’ ”

Currie also considers some of the complaints due to a second season, “post-honeymoon” syndrome. “I would be happier if they rang me about artistic matters,” he says. “Every Chorale member has complete access to me.”

The cutbacks, however they may have contributed to unease among the Chorale members, have not compromised the upcoming performances artistically, Currie maintains. In these times of widespread economic uncertainty in the arts, “any sensible artistic director would put in some parachutes,” he says of flexible concert planning.

“I was expecting to use the full Chorale for Mozart and Faure,” Currie says. The forces being used for St. Matthew, though, are not much less than what he had originally planned for the work.

The St. Matthew performance, Currie says, may be “small in numbers, but not at all small emotionally. I find that if you go much above 40 or 50 singers, you’re in a kind of texture that is not right, and it loses some dramatic excitement.”

Guest artists for St. Matthew include Belgian tenor Zeger Vandersteene as the Evangelist, and baritone David Downing--also a soloist in the Master Chorale’s recent performance of Britten’s “War Requiem”--as Christ. The Los Angeles Children’s Choir joins the 38 singers of the Master Chorale and the appropriately reduced Sinfonia orchestra.

The Master Chorale, Currie says, is pursuing plans for recording, touring and commissioning new works. He particularly misses doing new works. “Since I came here, its been the first period of my life when I’ve never conducted a premiere in a season. That’s something, again, which I very much hope to remedy.”

He would also like to see some kind of statewide series or performing network setup for the Master Chorale. His experience last season in leading the ensemble in a performance at the San Juan Capistrano Mission has much inspired him.

“I would like to think that the Chorale would be doing the Monteverdi Vespers in sites like that around the area. But that is a long, very positive, plan. You have to give yourself time to let these things build up.”

Indeed, long plans and careful building seem the core of Currie’s work. “Everything that we are doing--and when I say we , that’s not the royal we --is building.”