Saturday, 7 March 2009, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Subscription Concert 1
This concert commemorates the French composer Jean Mouton some 550 years after his birth. The first part of the program is a succession of motets composed for auspicious occasions in the life of the French court, to which Mouton was attached for the last two decades of his life. The second part is devoted to a single Marian motet followed by a Mass based upon it by the Spaniard Cristóbal de Morales.
PROGRAM
Jean Mouton O Christe redemptor, O rex omnipotens
Jean Mouton Caeleste beneficium
Jean Mouton Non nobis Domine, non nobis
Jean Mouton Quis dabit oculis nostris
Jean Mouton Missus est angelus Gabriel
Jean Mouton Domine salvum fac regem
Jean Mouton Exalta Regina Galliae
Jean Mouton Benedicta es caelorum regina
Cristóbal de Morales Missa Benedicta es caelorum regina
| SOPRANO | ALTOS | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Belinda Wong | Peter Campbell | Kieran Rowe |
| Carol Veldhoven | Jennifer Mathers | Tim van Nooten | Julien Robinson |
| Fiona Seers | Jenny George | Vaughan McAlley | Chris Potter |
| Maria Pisani | Niki Ebacioni | Stuart Tennant | Tim Daly |
| Claerwen Jones | |||
| Kathryn Pisani |
REVIEW
Tuesday, 10 March 2009, The Age [Melbourne], page 14.
Vocal display of grace and balance
Clive O’Connell
Under director John O’Donnell, the Ensemble Gombert opened its five-concert annual series with a
program consisting largely of motets by one of France’s greatest composers during the middle Renaissance.
Unusually for this expert choral group, much of Saturday night’s music-making required only four lines, the
effect in the recital’s first half one of piercing clarity, particularly in the sequence of apostrophes that occupy
much of the length in O Christe redemptor: one of several addresses to the Almighty to increase the
child-production rate of that unfortunate lady Anne of Brittany, who married three times without producing
the requisite son.
Not that Mouton’s music turns to the lugubrious when referring to the daughter-cursed queen; the fluency of
the eight motets sung by the Gomberts demonstrated the composer’s grace of utterance, sense of dynamic
balance, proportionate weighting of vocal layers, and interesting if unadventurous textures. Mouton had an
eye for textual highlighting, shown by his rare repetition of focal lines and employment of homophonic
movement when words held high significance, as during the deploration on Anne’s death, Quis dabit oculis
nostris.
Probably the most striking music of the night sounded the most atypical. The solid Missus est angelus Gabriel
tells the annunciation story pretty close to St Luke’s version but in a polyphonic five-line onslaught that
prefigures the sonorous grandeur of the Gabrielis’ Venice. The Gomberts produced a powerful sound, as
impervious to disruption as a waterfall, an engrossing display of vocal consonance in action.
Later, the ensemble sang another Marian motet, Benedicta es caelorum regina, and the Mass based on its
content by Morales. Apart from some coarseness from the tenors at the motet’s opening, this half of the night
generated the same impression of mastery, with the added benefit of the Spanish composer’s longer-breathed
melodic lines, his Mass ending in a moving Agnus Dei that started in the orthodox four parts, moved to
plainchant, then concluded in a full-bodied six-line texture displaying the female voices in this fine group.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age