Review: While COP30 copes, David Lang and the Master Chorale look beyond the environment

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In the midst of Belém’s COP30 bedlam, environmentalists, economists, lobbyists and diplomats busily haggle at the global climate conference about what we can and cannot get away with in negotiations over Mother Nature.Meanwhile, 5,000 miles away from northern Brazil at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale presented a novel argument.Rather than encouraging the COP-ers to enforce the right thing, David Lang’s “before and after nature,” in its Los Angeles premiere Sunday night, took humanity out of the equation.

Earth was here before proto-humans ventured onto land from the seas.Earth will outlast us.A founder in 1987 of Bang on a Can, which presents indispensable annual marathons of whatever composers come up with these days, Lang has an extensive range of works.

He can be ultra-quiet (the barely audible “Whisper Opera”) and plenty loud (writing for 120 guitars or 1,000 singers at a British soccer match).He was once outrageous, channeling Jimi Hendrix to Charles Ives, Steve Reich to Hans Werner Henze.

He titled an early orchestral piece for the Cleveland Orchestra “Eating Living Monkeys.” That didn’t go over well.Yet through a remarkable process of musical transformation, Lang has become a purifier, his music increasingly having turned cool, clean, eloquent, elemental.It sings of essences.

It questions everything.A recent hypnotic percussion piece of diced rhythms and pureed textures is called “the so-called laws of nature.” Obsessive gathering has led to Lang’s getting down to unadorned basics.With “before and after nature,” Lang follows up on the idea of nature’s so-called laws, and with “poor hymnal” (Lang also cuts back on capital letters), a choral work unveiled two years ago, he describes texts he’s culled from old hymnals as “a catalog of things a community of worshipers can agree on, a catalog that can be sung...