MUSIC REVIEWS : Orange Coast Chorale Performs Poulenc

The music of Francis Poulenc offers artists a formidable tightrope-walking challenge: To convey credibly its constantly alternating currents of facile frivolity tinged with gravity, profound seriousness colored by a dash of impudence, while neither neglecting nor emphasizing either element.

This is no piece of cake, as Richard Raub proved Saturday night in Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College. Conducting the Orange Coast Chorale and Orange Coast Singers in a Poulenc program, Raub elicited a performance that didn’t do justice to either indispensable ingredient.

Moore Theatre is so acoustically inhospitable that any group attempting to produce sound there begins with two strikes against it. Third strike: The assembled forces lacked adequate musical and technical resources to compensate for the unsympathetic venue.

Predominantly diffuse choral tone compromised obvious earnestness and diligent preparation. At any dynamic level less than forte, all too frequently mere whooshes of air emerged rather than a core of sound with genuinely identifiable pitch, especially among the men.

Rhythmic precision and verbal thrust carried talky sections satisfactorily, but the unconcentrated, evaporating tone in legato passages produced an annoying distortion: continual, unwritten diminuendos.

“Litanies a la Vierge Noir,” deceptively simple, deeply passionate (no covert frivolity here), got a surface reading from the women under Raub’s dampening direction. Drained of intensity, the piece fell flat, with rote-sung French no help.

The Stabat Mater featured some well-tuned, expressive a cappella sections and an embarrassing juxtaposition in the repeated descending runs of “Quis est homo”; the women mangled them each time, the orchestra perfectly articulated the echoes.

The “Gloria,” Poulenc’s last major composition, has more meat on its vocal and musical bones, and this group found its exuberance a more congenial exercise than the comparatively ascetic preceding works.

Kimberly Allman’s attractive, potentially proficient soprano lacks body and maintains repose only in tranquil passages. Focus dissipates as musical agitation escalates, and the arching “Amens” exposed register inequities and weak breath support.