Southeast Marks 50th With Vocal Guests

The Los Angeles area is rich in orchestras, not least in its myriad community and metropolitan bands of varying shapes and sizes and degrees of professionalism. Sunday evening one of the leaders of this usually unheralded group, the Southeast Symphony, celebrated its 50th season with a long, festive program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

With a modesty not entirely compatible with their solid achievement, Music Director John Dennison and his hard-working Southeasters offered only curtain raisers by Mendelssohn and Wagner on their own behalf. They also accompanied their capable principal flute, Vicente Pena, in the faded roulades of Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino.

They seemed less confident accompanying their primary guest, soprano Leona Mitchell. She sang six dramatic arias by Mozart, Verdi, Cilea and Puccini, which placed a premium on tonal warmth and patrician legato, demands she met with vocal radiance and emotional conviction, some troubled trills and a gruff chest voice notwithstanding.

Mitchell also ventured “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” in the sort of orotund arrangement now favored by operatic divas in crossover mode. The only trouble was, the other two-thirds of the program were given over to two of the most dynamic and inventive modern a cappella interpreters of spirituals, the Los Angeles-based Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers and the Moses Hogan Chorale from New Orleans.

Most of what the Jubilee Singers did was carried over from their own recent anniversary celebration in the Pavilion, with the exception of James Furman’s dizzyingly virtuosic “Heyleylooyuh.” The Louisiana visitors matched the home team in fervor and finesse in a generous set of Hogan’s arrangements, and both groups featured several charismatic soloists.

One might wonder why an orchestra wanted to celebrate a major milestone with such a banquet of singing, but unexpected though the menu was, the feast was memorably rewarding. Dennison led Mitchell, both choirs and his orchestra in an under-rehearsed and somewhat anticlimactic finale, Hogan’s arrangement of “Great Day!”