‘Voices of Light’ a Triumph for Carver and the Troops

The man most responsible for the success of “Voices of Light� was not on hand to share in the applause Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Carl Dreyer, whose 1928 silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc� inspired Richard Einhorn to write this oratorio, died in 1968.

We’ll never know whether he would have approved of Einhorn’s 1995 score to accompany his astonishing film. We do know he wanted Gregorian chant for it and hated a Baroque music montage assembled for mid-century screenings.

Einhorn’s score, which received its Los Angeles premiere last summer, incorporates elements of that chant as well as relying thoughtfully on romantic and minimalist techniques. At times, it powerfully reinforces cinematic events and uncannily evokes appropriate emotions; it never gets in the way of the film.

It was performed authoritatively and expressively by the female early-music quartet Anonymous 4, along with soprano Camille King, tenor Daniel Ebbers and bass Norman Goss, I Cantori and the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra, all under the knowing and sympathetic direction of Lucinda Carver.

Whether the score is the “right� accompaniment for the film matters less than accepting it as another distancing element between us and Joan, whom Dreyer isolates from the other characters, as well as from us, in a number of ways.

For all his emphasis on Joan’s humanity, Dreyer is aiming beyond it at something invisible and ineffable. Call it the source of her faith. We are closer to being Joan’s obtuse and wily judges, sadistic and stupid jailers or pitiable and pitying townspeople than we are to being her. Like them all, we can more likely apprehend the effects of her faith than the thing itself.

That may be the most humbling aspect of Dreyer’s achievement. We can be grateful Einhorn has given the film a new lease on life.

* Lucinda Carver will conduct the same forces in Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light,� accompanying a screening of Carl Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,� today,8 p.m., and Sunday, 4 p.m., at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater. $9-$33. (310) 825-2101.