A Cooperative ‘Passion’ : The Santa Clarita Singers and Cantori Domino Will Perform Together on Palm Sunday

Two choral groups that split off from established institutions after artistic and administrative battles will combine forces Sunday to sing a hallowed work that celebrates forgiveness and redemption.

The Santa Clarita Singers and Cantori Domino will present Bach’s “St. John Passion” at St. Clare Catholic Church in Canyon Country as part of that parish’s Palm Sunday observance. The performance, which is open to the public, will also feature the choir of St. Clare’s, several soloists and an 18-piece orchestra. Jeannine Wagner, the leader of the Santa Clarita Singers, will conduct.

The same lineup of groups performed the work last month at St. Augustine By-The-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica with the leader of Cantori Domino, Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh, conducting.

“It’s really a coincidence that we are doing this together, even though I have known Jeannine and worked with her for years,” said Phillips-Thornburgh, a conductor and soprano almost everyone knows by her nickname, Bunny.

Cantori Domino, which was founded in 1990 to sing works from the established repertoire in addition to new pieces, had been scheduled to do the “St. John Passion” alone at St. Augustine. Meanwhile, the Santa Clarita Singers were planning to do the same work, alone, at St. Clare’s.

“I saw they were doing it, and so we called up Bunny and said we should do it together,” Wagner said.

Wagner is the daughter of choral conductor Roger Wagner, who is himself a local institution. He was the director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from its debut in 1965 until he retired in 1986. His current group is the Roger Wagner Chorale, for which Jeannine Wagner is associate conductor.

Jeannine Wagner also does a good deal of movie and recording work. Most recently she coached David Clennon (Miles on “thirtysomething”), who plays the role of a conductor in the not-yet-released film “Man Trouble.” She also prepared the children’s choruses for the film “Hook” and the chorus for Randy Newman’s 1988 “Land of Dreams” album.

The 25-member Santa Clarita Singers was born of a cost-cutting move at CalArts in 1987. At that time, Wagner was on the faculty.

“Part of my job was conducting the community chorus,” she said.

“It was not a student group. It was made up of singers from the communities near the school. CalArts made facilities available for rehearsals and performances, but there were not many other costs.”

Nonetheless, the chorus was cut from the school’s roster.

“It seemed to me that if they were going to cut that program, I did not want to stay around, so I resigned,” said Wagner, who lives in West Los Angeles. “It turned out to be a kind of an opportunity. It gave us a chance to organize ourselves into an independent group.”

Phillips-Thornburgh, who is best-known locally as a soprano soloist, also taught at CalArts and was head of the Bel Air Presbyterian Church choir from 1982 until 1990, when she had a disagreement with church administrators.

“There is now a widespread trend in churches to do the kind of music that is essentially pop tunes,” said Phillips-Thornburgh, who lives in Canyon Country. “I did not want to do music that unsubstantial.”

Although she did not want to do modern pop, Phillips-Thornburgh said she was devoted to serious contemporary music. Using church choir members as the core, she founded Cantori Domino to perform sacred pieces from the standard repertoire and new works.

So far, all of Cantori Domino’s concerts have been in churches, and the group has performed pieces ranging from Renaissance music to Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and a new work by local composer and conductor Keith Clark.

The 50-singer group also once performed Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”

The passions of Christ--the four retellings of the story of Christ in the New Testament--have been the subject of musical settings as far back as the 4th Century and continuing into the present. Bach’s “Passions” are the most famous.

Musicologists now believe he wrote five during his lifetime (1685-1750), of which two survive in their entirety.

The more popular is the St. Matthew version, a towering work first performed in about 1727 and now considered one of Bach’s masterpieces. But the St. John, of 1724, although judged by musicologists to lack the astonishing musical unity of the St. Matthew, is nonetheless a powerful rendering of the passion story.

“The St. Matthew is a little more expansive, but the St. John is more propulsive, more rapid-fire,” said Phillips-Thornburgh. “In some ways, I think the drama in the ‘St. John Passion’ is more pointed.”

Wagner said that in preparing to conduct the “St. John Passion,” she discovered structures in the music that she had not previously found.

“It goes back to when I studied with Lucas Foss, when I was a student at UCLA,” Wagner said.

“We were analyzing Bach’s three-part inventions for keyboard, and he told us that there are some who think that some of the composer’s musical structures resemble a cross. Bach would have three musical strands going at the same time, and the way he built the quarter notes, eighth notes and 16th notes could suggest a cross.”

Wagner has found a similar construction in a chorus part of the “St. John Passion.”

“Maybe it’s a meditation on the cross, and maybe not. The piece works either way, but looking at it conceptually makes it even more interesting, more meaningful.

“Because we have this group, I have had the chance to go back and look at this work again. And because both of our groups exist, we had the chance to perform it twice.”

“St. John Passion” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Clare Catholic Church, 19606 Calla Way, Santa Clarita. Tickets are $7.50, adults, and $5, seniors and students. Call: (805) 254-6266 or (213) 656-7343.