John Alexander’s "Serenade to Music" at the Segerstrom

John Alexander conducts the Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony Orchestra in his "final, final" concert with them.

REVIEW

Pacific Chorale, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

“Never say never again” could have been the subtitle to this concert. When he retired in 2017 after 45 years as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Pacific Chorale, Prof. John Alexander stated firmly that his final appearance of that 2016-2017 season, in which he conducted Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony, would be his last on the Segerstrom Concert Hall’s podium. However… nearly a decade later, the Chorale’s present Music Director Dr. Robert Istad suggested that he could return once more to conduct their final concert of the 2025-2026 season and he agreed.

The program was to be entirely his choice, and how and why he came to make the selections he did (after acknowledging that his first preference, which would have been for Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts, was not possible on logistical grounds!) he explained in a fascinating conversation with his successor, fortunately preserved on YouTube.

It’s probably true to say that a choral/orchestral work has a smaller chance of being performed if it does not fill half, most, or all of an evening, as opposed to the many overtures, suites, and average-length concertos frequently played in purely orchestral concerts ahead of the big program-climaxing symphony. Alexander noted, however, that smaller choral works had always formed an essential part of his programming and here he had devised a sequence entirely of such pieces, with the overall aim of affirming how essential music is in life, coupled with poetry that expresses this.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1938.

His selection ranged over four centuries, but he began in 20th century England with the work whose title adumbrates this idea. Unsurprisingly, his account of Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music immediately confirmed his affinity with that composer—indeed, it made me sorry that I had not been around to hear that previous valedictory performance of the Sea Symphony, and indeed was now exceedingly unlikely to hear live any others of RVW’s choral masterworks (what price Sancta Civitas or the Five Tudor Portraits?).

His pliant shaping of the Serenade to Music’s substantial 30-measure orchestral introduction was rewarded with beautifully sensitive playing from the Pacific Symphony Orchestra—its string sections reduced by a desk or two as seems to be standard when performing with the Pacific Chorale—and radiant tone from Concertmaster Dennis Kim in the important solo violin part.

Vaughan Williams wrote his Serenade to Music in 1938 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sir Henry Wood’s London Promenade Concerts, scoring it for orchestra and 16 named soloists (4S-4A-4T-4B), with whom he recorded it. However, realizing that this was not the most practicable form for the piece in future performance, he made several arrangements: for chamber orchestra, for violin and orchestra, for choir and piano, and for choir (with or without SATB soloists) and orchestra. It was the latter which Maestro Alexander included, and it introduced the evening’s featured soloist, the soprano Elissa Johnston (right).

For a complete change of color and pace Alexander’s program moved to a pairing of his two Austrian favorites, Mozart from the 18th century and Bruckner from the 19th. If the Vaughan Williams had demonstrated the Pacific Chorale’s homogeneity and richness of tone, the last of Mozart’s three settings of Regina Coeli, K.276 (1779) showed that this large chorus could be just as unanimous and pungent in fast, dance-like music, swinging with jubilant relish into Mozart’s near quotes from Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. The work’s brief solo parts also gave moments in the sun for four Pacific Chorale members: Chelsea Chaves (soprano), I-Chin Betty Feinblatt (mezzo-soprano), Jason Francisco (tenor), and Michael Fagerstedt (bass).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1777.

Then we throttled right down for the fifth, Laudate Dominum, movement from Mozart’s Solemn Vespers, K.339 (1780), in which Ms. Johnston scaled back her ample vocal powers to match the exquisite intimacy of the setting, accompanied by reduced strings which expanded to full strength for the choral second half of the piece.

More often than not recordings of Anton Bruckner’s unaccompanied choral works are made by relatively small choirs, and the Pacific Chorale’s account of his Ave Maria, WAB 6 (1861)—the only one of his three settings of the Ave Maria that is a cappella—was a welcome reminder of the increased breadth of dynamic and timbre that you can only get from a really substantial body of voices.

Anton Bruckner, 1894.

Then their full power was unleashed in Bruckner’s setting of Psalm 150, WAB 38 (1892), his last completed work but one, and as compact as it is granitic and intricately detailed. Indeed in this performance I felt that a little more rehearsal would have helped to nail its complex interactions between chorus and orchestra.

However, it was a joy to hear this rarely-performed masterpiece, not only for the massive impact of chorus and orchestra but also the delicious interplay between solo violin and soprano in the central section—played and sung by Mr. Kim and Ms. Johnston respectively with consummate artistry—and the only possible regret at the end of this first half was that more was not heard of Christoph Bull’s featured organ role, confined as it was to accompanying the two Mozart pieces. Bruckner’s Te Deum instead of Psalm 150 would have filled that particular bill, but sadly would have bulked out the program to an unacceptable degree.

The second half opened with John Alexander being honored (above) by Pacific Chorale Board Chair Julie Virjee with the title of Artistic Director Laureate, after which he took to the podium again to direct his next choice, Brahms’ Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op.54 (1868-71).

Johannes Brahms, 1869.

Here the chorus and orchestra were as dreamily concordant in the first section—Brahms’ Langsam und sehnsuehtsvoll (Slow and wistful) evocation of Hölderlin’s vision of the “blessed spirits”’ celestial calm—as they were trenchant in the succeeding turbulent depiction of human suffering: nothing here of the slight uncertainty of ensemble that to my ears had been present in Psalm 150. The composer’s inspired orchestra-only postlude, recapitulating the work’s opening, was perfectly paced by the Pacific Symphony under Maestro Alexander.

John Alexander grouped the last three items of his "Serenade to Music" program together as the finale to what he had characterized in his conversation with Dr. Istad as a kind of “meta-symphony,” and indeed asked the audience to refrain from applause between each (would that more conductors would make that request for multi-movement works in any genre!).

Lili Boulanger, Rome, 1914.

At first sight the pairing of Lili Boulanger’s Soir sur la plaine (Evening on the plain)—with which in 1913 she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome—with works composed nearly a century later by Frank Ticheli (b.1958) and Jake Heggie (b.1961), might have seemed a stretch, but the connection between them lay in performance history by the Pacific Chorale and Alexander as he had, in 2000, conducted the first performance of the newly edited original choral/orchestral version of the piece, as well as many by the two Americans.

The present account of Soir sur la plaine reaffirmed—if that were needed given the extent to which her genius has at last been recognized—that Boulanger’s ear for instrumental and vocal color, and harmonic richness and subtlety, was quite equal to that of her great French compatriots Debussy and Ravel. What she might have achieved had she lived beyond the age of 24 beggars imagination. As it was, the acutely sensitive and atmospheric performance of it by the Pacific Symphony and Chorale—joined again by Elissa Johnston and two more Chorale members, Jane Hyun-Jung Shim and Daniel Coy Babcock—was arguably the high point of the whole concert.

Frank Ticheli.

Ticheli’s There Will be Stars (2009) was the second a cappella work of the evening, its soft harmonic clashes and gently aspiring tranquility as rendered by the Pacific Chorale underlining the point about the singular qualities of a big chorus unaccompanied. It was brief enough to make one regret that the two even shorter movements that precede it, forming the triptych Constellation, could not have been included so as to place it in the context of the complete work.

Jake Heggie.

Finally, and expressively poles apart, came Jake Heggie’s Seeking Higher Ground: Bruce Springsteen Rocks New Orleans, April 30, 2006, which Pacific Chorale had commissioned for the opening of the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in 2006, the year following New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina disaster.

For ideas Heggie had turned to his collaborator Sister Helen Prejean, librettist for his opera Dead Man Walking, who had lived through Katrina and its aftermath in the city. Despite the tragedy, it had been decided to press ahead with the 2006 New Orleans Jazz Festival, at which Bruce Springsteen performed (hence Heggie’s work’s subtitle) and the event became a defining moment in the city’s recovery.

Seeking Higher Ground adumbrates both the immediate horror of Katrina and the regenerative power of music via that Festival. In its sense of urgent engagement with contemporary tragedy, it brought to mind Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, an impression strengthened by both works’ resort to spirituals in their aspirational language. Fervently sung and played, it brought this celebratory event to a powerful end, and Maestro Alexander and his combined forces were greeted with a prolonged and cheering ovation. 

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Pacific Chorale, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, 7pm, Saturday, May 23, 2026.

Images: The performance: Jamie Pham; Vaughan Williams: Howard Coster, © National Portrait Gallery; Mozart, Bruckner, Brahms: Wikimedia Commons; Boulanger: Musée de la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris; Ticheli, Heggie: composers' websites.

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