The organ-and-chorus program presented Sunday afternoon at the Meyerson Symphony Center was a rather incoherent grab bag. And, annoyingly, there was no printed program, just a digital link. Who wants to sit in a concert futzing with a cellphone?
But there was first-class playing from Alcée Chriss III, who proved himself in the top ranks of a current crop of brilliant young organists. In works composed between 1888 and 1931, he displayed dazzling virtuosity of fingers and feet, while also showing off a huge variety of sounds on the Meyerson’s big 1992 Fisk organ.
Chriss, who grew up in Fort Worth, has a doctorate from McGill University in Montreal. He also displayed compositional skills — and an early and enduring absorption in jazz — with the Sanctus and Benedictus from his own Jazz Mass. Conceived in 2000, later expanded with full jazz band accompaniment, it was presented here with the Dallas Symphony Chorus, soprano saxophone, three DSO trombones and electric guitar, conducted by chorus director Anthony Blake Clark. Setting modern English texts from the current Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, it imagines the hosts of heaven in hip-shifting happiness.
In a 12-voice Giovanni Gabrieli Sanctus, the chorus was dramatically separated into three groups — onstage, in the choral terrace and the Meyerson’s top balcony — with trombone and organ accompaniment. The program’s choral component also included Mendelssohn’s “Hear my prayer,” beloved by many a choral singer. It was lovely to hear it with two boy-soprano soloists, still the norm in many English cathedral and collegiate choirs. Knox Shurley and Jacob Garcia Villar, members of the Dallas Symphony Children’s Chorus, sang with impressive assurance. Chriss accompanied.
The dynamic contrast between the two soloists and the big chorus — 200-plus singers — was a bit much. Thirty voices would have been better, and one could imagine a more polished choral sound, but this was a first outing for the season.
Chriss opened the concert with a dashing account of the first movement of Elgar’s Organ Sonata. Elgar conceived the work for English organs much mellower and more delicately colored than the full-throated Fisk, and Chriss sometimes favored too detached a touch. But he managed elaborate shifts of volume and color with great panache.
The Fantasie Choral No. 1 by the far less known English composer Percy Whitlock offered more opportunities for Chriss’ mastery of color contrasts, crescendos and decrescendos. But compared with Whitlock’s many delightful shorter organ pieces, this one sprawls.
There were gentler interludes in an Entrée from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Les Boréades and Chriss’ own arrangement of the Allegretto from Franck’s D minor Symphony. The latter could have used more room to stretch and breathe.
The pièce de résistance was Max Reger’s massive Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H. Chriss dispatched its gnarly contrapuntal textures and orchestral shifts of volume and texture with seemingly effortless virtuosity. In friendly and otherwise helpful spoken comments, it’s too bad he didn’t explain that B-A-C-H in German pitch usage refers to the notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural.
The encore was Whitlock’s delightfully popsy “Waltz: In the Ballroom,” arranged from the Holiday Suite for orchestra.
