Saturday, 19 May 2001, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Subscription Concert 3
Binchois would not have had an inkling that his chanson Comme femme desconfortée was destined for greatness. But once one Renaissance composer decided to borrow a certain melodic line as the basis of a new work others tended to follow, and this is what happened to the tenor line of Binchois’ beautiful but otherwise not particularly significant chanson. This program features four Marian motets and a Mass based on this melody. The peroration of the major work (viz. the final Agnus Dei of the Isaac Mass) features some of the most extreme false relations of the High Renaissance.
PROGRAM
Gilles de Bins dit Binchois Comme femme desconfortée
Josquin Desprez Stabat mater
Johannes Ghiselin Inviolata, integra et casta
Johannes Ghiselin Regina caeli laetare
Ludwig Senfl Ave rosa sine spinis
Heinrich Isaac Missa Comme femme desconfortée
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Jennifer George | Peter Campbell | John Weretka |
| Margaret Pearce | Susie Furphy | Tim Van Nooten | Sam Furphy |
| Claerwen Jones | Margaret Arnold | Vaughan McAlley | Andrew Fysh |
| Maria Pisani | Barbara Tattam | Stuart Tennant | |
| Helen Gagliano | |||
–
REVIEW
Tuesday, 22 May 2001, The Age [Melbourne], page 5, Today.
The gamut of musical talent
Clive O’Connell
[…]
MELBOURNE’S premier choir, Ensemble Gombert, gave the second in its annual series of recitals on
Saturday – an under-advertised affair given to a smaller audience than usual. However, the program was short
enough to be given in one 75-minute sweep: four Marian motets and an Isaac Mass, all based on a Binchois rondeau, Comme femme desconfortee.
There has been some reshuffling among the singers – 16 for this recital. In the secure and gently contoured
reading of Desprez’s Stabat mater, one of the tenors moved in with the altos; Jerzy Kozlowski was absent
from the basses, Carol Veldhoven from the sopranos. But the ensemble’s combination and its balance shifts in
five-part works is one of the great delights of this city’s musical life.
The night’s highpoint, the Isaac work, shows the composer’s constructional powers at their least challenging,
particularly as the Binchois melody is enunciated in long penetrating notes by the tenors at various stages.
The Gomberts emphasised the work’s sprightliness, its lightness relative to many of the composer’s other
works in the form. Isaac’s final Agnus Dei, where the sopranos repeat the same pattern and words above a
gently uncoiling set of lower lines, punctuated by harmonic clashes, brought this short night to a particularly
bracing end.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age