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
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Belinda Wong | Peter Campbell (Saturday) | Alexander Roose |
| Carol Veldhoven | Jennifer Mathers | Vaughan McAlley (Sunday) | Adrian Phillips |
| Kathryn Pisani | Niki Ebacioni | Tim Van Nooten | Tom Reid |
| Fiona Seers | Barbara Tattam | Frank Prain | Philip Nicholls |
| Maria Pisani | Stuart Tennant | ||
| Claerwen Jones | |||
| Helen Gagliano |
–
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