LOS ANGELES — “At least when Lenny falls off the ladder,” Stephen Sondheim once said, “he falls off the highest rung.” Sondheim’s backhanded compliment referred to Bernstein’s overstuffed, sometimes brilliant Mass, which opened in 1971 at the inauguration of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Now comes 39-year-old American composer and activist Carlos Simon, whose similarly ambitious Good News Mass received its premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall on April 17 with Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
In interviews, Simon acknowledged Bernstein’s two-hour, multi-cultural monument as an influence. Mercifully, Simon’s gospel, classical, blues, and neo-romantic-infused, 16-movement score clocks in at just under an hour.
Simon, currently a composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center, comes from a family of ministers deeply rooted in spirituals and gospel music. He and his cast — Samoht (alto), Zebulon Ellis (tenor), spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and the choir of Jason White and the Samples — created a seemingly authentic gospel church environment in Disney Hall.
Joseph, who wrote new poetry to enhance Courtney Ware Lett‘s libretto, became Simon’s analogue to Bernstein’s central character of the Celebrant. He’s essentially preaching to his flock in an incantatory, rhythmic way. By turns wry, slyly didactic, numinous, and poetically vague, Joseph’s words arise out of what writer Gayl Jones once termed “liberating voices.” That is, as part of an oral tradition in which meaning is sometimes initially secondary to syntax and sound. For example, in “Prayer of Thanksgiving”: “Remain grateful for the storms and the stabilizing force of trust, for the gusting turbulence of ethics, for blushing moons, for huddled intimacies, and the blood of art…”
Images projected on a large screen over the stage, courtesy of creative director Melina Matsoukas and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, included a young Black girl doing a handstand on a pile of books while Joseph recites: Thank you to the dangerous authors who presently know a book can’t be banned if it wasn’t published in the first place.
When the music, singing, and orchestral playing are top-tier, as they all were here, visuals can quickly become superfluous, an unnecessary distraction. However, they got off to a vivid start, establishing a microcosm of an African-American neighborhood: people sitting on a bench, boys running in slow motion, a burning car, a man holding a “Jesus Saves” sign, a church.
Simon’s richly textured and stylistically varied score opened with an attention-getting percussive flourish before all the Hallelujahs kicked in. A stirring “Lord’s Prayer” followed, with the chorus in glorious form, if perhaps a bit too loud for the room. The final section, “God’s Love,” a barrage of joy from chorus, tenor, and alto, also underestimated the sensitivity of the hall’s acoustics.
Thick curtains installed on the sides of the hall’s organ loft for these two Easter weekend performances (the second followed on April 18) helped make Joseph’s spoken words more clear. Still, Disney has never been an effective hall for miked orations. Joseph’s declamatory passages, as in the “Introit,” were less distinct, his more intimate ones in “Affirmation of Faith” just right for the room.
The singing remained gorgeously nuanced and warm throughout, with Samoht deeply moving in “Save Me, Lord,” a neo-romantic pop-friendly tune finely balanced by Dudamel and the Philharmonic. Ellis, too, had several touching moments, especially in “Oh, Give Thanks,” which employed a more traditional gospel configuration featuring the Hammond B-3 organ and choir.
The concert’s first half began with Bernstein’s Divertimento, an eight-part suite from 1980 celebrating the Boston Symphony’s 100th season. Dudamel and the orchestra’s colorful reading doubtless converted many listeners to its charms and rhythmic delights. Reportedly, the audience at the premiere applauded after each section, as they did at Disney. The piece came off as a kind of cheeky “Adult Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” with changing moods and virtuosic section playing, from crisply percussive rhythms in “Turkey Trot” to a witty 12-tone row in “Sphinxes,” which faded into atmospheric woodwinds in “Blues.” Bernstein, who grew up hearing Arthur Fiedler conduct the Boston Pops, aptly concluded the work with a Sousa-like march.
Next came 28-year-old violinist Randall Goosby‘s rendition of Florence Price’s lushly yearning Violin Concerto No. 2 in a first LA Phil performance. Composed in 1952, a year before she died, the concerto was discovered, along with other scores, in 2009. It’s an eventful 16 minutes. Goosby, while not commanding a big sound, compensated with sweetly characterized playing. He’s also a naturally communicative stage presence. After his encore, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s “Jettin’ Blues,” Goosby promised after intermission “an electric night of Black joy and excellence.”
That proved largely true. Yet given our current cultural climate, Good News Mass arrived with a sobering side. Last month, Joseph was abruptly fired as the Kennedy Center’s VP and artistic director of the Social Impact initiative, which worked with disadvantaged youth and the disabled. He was denied the opportunity to plan a transition with other worthy grant-dependent arts organizations.
Good News Mass is scheduled to be performed in January 2026 by the Boston Symphony, where Simon is composer chair.
Bernstein’s exhortation that “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason” seems more prescient than ever. The final image of Simon’s Mass shows a defiant Black woman standing in a running brook nursing her baby. It reminded this reviewer of James Baldwin’s character John in his classic 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, who says, “It’s a long way…ain’t it? It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way.”
As Simon’s stirring Mass confirms, it’s just as true now as it was then.
