Christmas to Candlemas (2003)

Saturday 13 December 2003, 8 pm
Sunday 14 December 2003, 2.30 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 5

Our Christmas to Candlemas program commences in twentieth-century France with Poulenc’s four motets for the Christmas season, before settling in Tudor England.

PROGRAM

Francis Poulenc Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël
Thomas Tallis Hodie nobis caelorum Rex
John Sheppard Reges Tharsis et insulae
William Byrd Hodie beata virgo Maria
William Byrd Senex puerum portabat
Gregorian chant Puer natus est nobis
Thomas Tallis Missa Puer natus est nobis

–
REVIEW

Thursday, 18 December 2003,The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Deserving of international success
Clive O’Connell

For the ninth consecutive year, Melbourne’s pre-eminent chamber choir presented a Christmas recital with a
combination of semi-contemporary French and English Renaissance music.
As director John O’Donnell observed, it is rare to hear a high-calibre performance of serious ecclesiastical
music in a Melbourne concert hall. Not even Handel’s Messiah qualifies, as its content and provenance are
more readily associated with Easter. Poulenc’s Quatre motets pour le temps de Noel have made little inroads
into real-time services in Christian churches, although their harmonic language is simple and consonant, and
the melodic motives of O magnum mysterium and Videntes stellam live in the memory well after a performance.
Despite their focus on 16th-century music, the Gomberts have an enviable ability to move across many styles.
Indeed, the spare beauty of the four Poulenc pieces, with their bursts of full-bodied consonance and a
forefronting of the soprano line that harks back to a much earlier time, fitted the ensemble’s personnel most
congenially, as did the cool restraint of the works’ emotional content.
The major part of the recital featured earlier music: a motet by Tallis, Reges Tharsis et insulae by his
neglected contemporary John Sheppard, and two pieces for the Feast of the Purification, Candlemas itself, by
Byrd.
Bringing up the rear were the Christmas plainchant Puer natus est nobis and the recently discovered and
edited Mass by Tallis based on it. This work, in seven parts, must rank as one of the most awe-inspiring
examples of Catholic church music from pre-Elizabethan England.
Its majestic progression, the startling spikiness of its false-relation harmonic clashes and the sumptuous
spread of its lines made it a memorable example of the Gomberts’ mastery of idiom and reliability of pitch.
Of course, there were momentary indications of fatigue, notably from the tenors who are cruelly stretched at
various points. But you could overlook this when faced with the even spread and audibility of line, qualities
achieved mainly through the director’s acute awareness of the relative vocal strengths of each member in his
forces.
No wonder the Gomberts are anxious to display their talents overseas, particularly in Britain, where the purity
and precision of their sound would surely meet with an enthusiastic reception.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age