Year: 2004

Saturday, 18 December 2004, 8pm
Sunday, 19 December 2004, 2.30pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Also performed at St Ambrose, Woodend, Saturday 12 December

Subscription Concert 5
ABC Classic FM Direct Broadcast

Finally, this year’s Christmas to Candlemas features, in addition to a selection of Renaissance works, Benjamin Britten’s youthful masterpiece, A Boy was Born. Composed when he was 19, the work made Britten a household name throughout Britain literally overnight, with the BBC’s broadcast on 23 February 1934.

PROGRAM

Josquin Desprez O admirabile commercium
Nicolas Gombert O magnum mysterium
Michael Praetorius Resonet in laudibus
Richard Dering Quem vidistis, pastores
Jacob Handl Mirabile mysterium
Orlande de Lassus Omnes de Saba venient
Tomás Luis de Victoria Senex puerum portabat
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Nunc dimittis
Benjamin Britten A Boy was Born

–
Additional “Trebles” for A Boy was Born:
Michèle de Courcy, Nina Pereira, Sally Watt

REVIEW

Tuesday, 21 December 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Gomberts take the road less travelled, splendidly
Clive O’Connell

FAR removed from the Myer windows model of celebrating Christmas that focuses on fictional characters or
a recent children’s fad, the Ensemble Gombert follows a harder road.
No Silent Night or Good King Wenceslas for this group; rather, the singers go to the highest achievements of
Western polyphonic music, celebrations of the happy season, but couched in a musical vocabulary that asks
more of the listener than an easy surge of sentimentality.
The Gomberts opened their tour of the feastdays that run from Christmas Eve to the Presentation of Christ in
the Temple with Josquin’s complex motet O admirabile commercium, which hymns the extraordinary
exchange of Godhead for human form and manages to sum up the whole wonder of Christ’s birth with a calm
ecstasy in which the music’s dynamic hovers somewhere between the rhapsodic text and the ebb and flow of
the vocal interplay.
What followed this initial gambit was a kind of digest of Renaissance musical art, vaulting from the broadly
spread consonances of Praetorius in a jubilant Resonet in laudibus to the fierce chromaticisms found in Jacob
Handl’s Mirabile mysterium for the Feast of the Circumcision, a motet that juxtaposes chords in unexpected
contexts just as the words speak of the paradox of Christ’s position in the world both as child and master of
creation.
As well, the group expounded their namesake’s setting of O magnum mysterium, which deals with the images
of the stable in Bethlehem through a finely crafted expression of delight and stalwart confidence.
The opening section of the afternoon ended with the rich mastery of Lassus picturing the Magi adoring
Christ, Victoria’s tense Senex puerum portabat, the whole sequence climaxing in Palestrina’s opulent 12-part
Nunc dimittis – an overwhelming fabric that ended all too quickly.
Jumping abruptly to contemporary times, the Gomberts sang a full-bodied and generally confident account of
Britten’s A Boy was Born, written when the composer was 19 and serving as his calling-card on the British
musical establishment. The work’s difficulties – intense seconds and sevenths, gruff bass lines, layers of text
and linear disjunctions – are enough to tax any choir.
But these musicians met its challenges with their customary sangfroid, responding, with a will, to John
O’Donnell’s intense direction.
Clive O’Conell/Courtesy of The Age

Sunday, 14 November 2004, 2.30pm
Hawthorn Town Hall, Burwood Road, Hawthorn

The Mozart Collection 2004
presented by The Academy of Melbourne

PROGRAM

Johannes Brahms Motets Op. 74, No.1 & Op. 109 [performed by Ensemble Gombert]
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 [performed by The Melbourne Symphonic Chorus]

–
Additional singers for Beethoven (to comprise the Melbourne Symphonic Chorus):
SOPRANO: Michèle de Courcy, Cecilia Harkin, Jacqueline James, Nina Pereira, Andrea Reichert, Sally Watt
ALTO: Barbara Beer, Sophie Chapman, Alice O’Kane, Leonie Tonkin
TENOR: Tim Bell, Joel Gladman, Robert Parbs, Frank Prain, Louise Tunbridge
BASS: Richard Bolitho, Nicholas Carter, Mark Dulfer, Ken Falconer, Geoff Millar, Peter Neustupny, Julien Robinson, Martin Strauss, Roderick Vance

The Academy of Melbourne
Brett Kelly – artistic director & conductor
Michael Kisin – leader

REVIEW

Tuesday, 16 November 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Kelly gang in raid on Beethoven
Clive O’Connell

BEETHOVEN’S Choral Symphony saw Academy of Melbourne artistic director Brett Kelly call on
members of Orchestra Victoria and well-known freelancers to assist his usual ensemble – itself made up of
many Melbourne Symphony Orchestra musicians.
For choral forces, we heard the excellent Ensemble Gombert and friends as the Melbourne Symphonic
Chorus – about 40 singers in all. And Kelly was well endowed with the four essential soloists: soprano
Merlyn Quaife, mezzo Lynlee Williams, tenor Adrian McEniery and bass Ian Cousins.
John O’Donnell conducted a brief first half, his Ensemble Gombert singing four choral works by Brahms,
beginning with the popular Warum ist das Licht gegeben, followed by the three Fest und Gedenkspruche –
works which the choir has sung recently in a program of Brahms’ a cappella religious music. The close
acoustics of this hall gave an insight into the group’s reliability and fearlessness, qualities that tend to be
forgotten in the flattering surrounds of its home base at Xavier Chapel.
Kelly took a bluff approach to the symphony’s first three movements, hammering out the first movement’s
craggy contours with little room for metaphysical musing. The following scherzo moved at startling speed,
timpani and strings hard pressed to get their notes out cleanly.
Opening the famous choral finale, Cousins made a wobbly start to the opening recitative, but soon recovered
for a firm outlining of the movement’s major theme. Kelly encouraged his orchestra during the opening
choral gambits, so the choristers’ impact was muted, not helped by the stage’s framing curtains. A better
balance came after the soloists entered in the second stanza and the often awkward Seid umschlungen
segment moved past less cumbersomely than in readings heard here during the past 15 years.
Next year, the Academy is taking a sabbatical, drawing breath to shore up their approach and support. Apart
from one major performance in November, the first we will hear from this estimable body comes after its
regrouping in a full 2006 season; a disappointment for Academy admirers but clearly a vital developmental
step.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 6 November 2004, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 4

Concert 4 consists of 21 items from the Cantiones sacrae published by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in 1575. Each contributed 17 motets to the collection, presumably celebrating the seventeenth year of the reign of Elizabeth I, to whom it is dedicated.

PROGRAM

Thomas Tallis Te lucis ante terminum (2 settings)
Thomas Tallis Salvator mundi
Thomas Tallis Miserere nostri
Thomas Tallis In jejunio et fletu
Thomas Tallis Derelinquat impius
Thomas Tallis In manus tuas
Thomas Tallis Dum transisset Sabbatum
Thomas Tallis Candidi facti sunt Nazarei
Thomas Tallis O nata lux
Thomas Tallis Suscipe quaeso
William Byrd Attollite portas
William Byrd Miserere mihi, Domine
William Byrd Emendemus in melius
William Byrd Memento homo
William Byrd Tribue, Domine
William Byrd Siderum rector
William Byrd Laudate, pueri, Dominum
William Byrd O lux, beata Trinitas

–
REVIEW

Thursday, 11 November, The Age [Melbourne], page 6, A3.
Gombert’s Precision; ACO’s dash
Clive O’Connell

BACK from their first European tour, the Ensemble Gombert singers worked through two brackets of Tudor
motets by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. Touring the composers’ ground-breaking joint publication,
Cantiones sacrae, the program comprised about two-thirds of that volume’s contents.
John O’Donnell and his gifted group presented both ends of the English Renaissance musical
spectrum – from the brief and plaintive Miserere nostri, Domine by Tallis, to the exhausting, imaginative
vaults in Byrd’s Tribue, Domine. Yet again, the group demonstrated its precision of pitch and enunciation, the
sinewy arches of this marvellous polyphony holding as firm as the flying buttresses they mimic.
The fiercely difficult Dum transisset Sabbatum by Tallis requires the first sopranos to sing continuously at the
top of their range. Despite some anxious moments, this gripping work swept to a secure conclusion.
[…]
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 17 July 2004, 8 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 3

Concert 3 is a repeat of our very first subscription program from March 1995, a smorgasbord of polyphony from the High Renaissance to the Late Baroque.

PROGRAMS

Josquin Desprez Ave Maria
Josquin Desprez  Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria
Josquin Desprez  Benedicta es, caelorum Regina
Nicolas Gombert Regina caeli laetare
Philippe de Monte Super flumina Babylonis
William Byrd Quomodo cantabimus
Carlo Gesualdo Responsoria: Sabbato Sancto — In ij Noct.
1. ‘Recessit pastor noster’
2. ‘O vos omnes’
3. ‘Ecce quomodo moritur justus’
Johann Sebastian Bach Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

–
REVIEWS

Tuesday, 20 July 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 13, A3
Gomberts in excellent form; Crellin reliable
Clive O’Connell

On the verge of their first overseas tour, the Ensemble Gombert is in excellent form, showing its high
performance level plainly at Saturday’s Paragons of Polyphony recital. The program, offered as one long
stretch of sonorous fabric, began with three Marian motets by Josquin and ended with the exhausting Singet
dem Herrn by Bach for double choir.
But the central parts of the evening gave the most fruitful rewards. First, the group’s namesake constructed a
rich complex of 12 lines in his Regina caeli laetare, brought to a splendid realisation by these 18 singers
whose interpretation of the harmonic clashes of the motet’s second half generated the kind of assured
professionalism heard from no other Australian choir of this type.
Philippe de Monte’s Catholic lament Super flumina Babylonis and the more uncomfortably situated
Englishman Byrd’s response demonstrated the group’s talent at realising such emotionally sophisticated
music’s drama without resorting to over-hyped dynamics or adding cosmetic touches to the steady polyphonic
mesh.
Even in three of the Responsoria for Holy Saturday by the arch-mannerist Gesualdo, O’Donnell and the
Gomberts took a measured approach, leaving the composer’s surprising chromatic slips and slides to speak
for themselves as sincere illustrations of the noble texts. The Gomberts’ ability to handle this kind of intense,
demanding work should generate enthusiasm on their European circuit.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 15 May 2004, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 2

Concert 2 is made up of double-choir works old and new. Following the success of our venture into Brahms in 2003 we are extending our German Romantic repertoire with Psalms of Mendelssohn; and Frank Martin’s celebrated double-choir Mass is one of our two twentieth century offerings for the year.

PROGRAM

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Stabat mater
Michael Praetorius Christus, der uns selig macht
Michael Praetorius Gott der Vater wohn uns bei
Johann Sebastian Bach Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf
Felix Mendelssohn Drei Psalmen, Opus 78
1. ‘Warum toben die Heiden’
2. ‘Richte mich, Gott’
3. ‘Mein Gott, warum’
Frank Martin Mass for Double Choir

–
REVIEW

Wednesday, 19 May 2004,The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Two artforms, two choirs, twice the work
Joel Crotty

[…]
ENSEMBLE Gombert have garnered a solid reputation for their performances of unaccompanied choral
music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This time around, the 18 voices, under the direction of
John O’Donnell (pictured), moved into the 19th and 20th centuries. Mendelssohn’s Drei Psalmen op. 78 and
Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir proved to be the stand-out works of the event.
The solos in the Mendelssohn were superbly handled, as was the vocal blend in the long stretches of
homophonic writing. Equally as impressive was the reading of Martin’s Mass, helped in no small way by the
sympathetic acoustics of the Xavier College Chapel.
Double choir works can be tricky affairs to get right. The lack of balance between the two sets of choristers
can often lead to muddy interpretations. This was the unfortunate outcome for Praetorius’s Christus, der uns
selig macht and Gott der Vater wohn’ uns bei, and Bach’s Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf. Although the
struggle was there during those works, the choir was in top form throughout Palestrina’s Stabat mater.
Joel Crotty/Courtesy of The Age