Sunday 17 April 2010, 2 pm
Melbourne Recital Centre, 31 Sturt Street. Southbank
Conducted by Jeremy Summerly (Royal Academy of Music, London) with a period instrument ensemble led by Rachel Beesley and featuring Ensemble Gombert, The Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne, The Consort of Melbourne, and outstanding vocalists. This landmark choral event is presented by the Melbourne Recital Centre.
PROGRAM
J.S. Bach St Matthew Passion (Matthäus-Passion)
| SOPRANO | ALTOS | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Belinda Wong | Peter Campbell | Kieran Rowe |
| Carol Veldhoven | Jennifer Mathers | Tim van Nooten | Alistair Clark |
| Fiona Seers | Rebecca Woods | Vaughan McAlley | |
| Claerwen Jones | Niki Ebacioni | Stuart Tennant | |
| Maria Pisani | |||
| Kathryn Pisani |
The Consort of Melbourne
The Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne
Ensemble Gombert
Trebles of Melbourne Grammar School Chapel Choir
Ironwood Chamber Orchestra
Rachel Beesley – concertmaster
Julia Fredersdorff – concertmaster
Robert Macfarlane – Evangelist
Michael Leighton Jones – Christus
Siobhàn Stagg – soprano solo
Lynette Alcantara – alto solo
Paul Bentley – tenor solo
Peter Tregear – bass solo
REVIEWS
Tuesday, 19 April 2011, The Age [Melbourne], page 15.
A long afternoon with Bach’s Passion
Clive O’Connell
A mixture of Melbourne-based choirs proved the main attraction at Sunday’s performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Without a program, I could identify only some participants, but members of the Ensemble Gombert, the Consort of Melbourne and Trinity College Choir featured among the personnel whose chorales made welcome hiatus points throughout the reading.
British conductor Jeremy Summerly directed a straightforward account of this Baroque masterwork, giving plenty of room to the music’s powerful drama by encouraging the vocal forces to produce full-blooded attacks. The double orchestra sounded uneven, one more careful with tuning and production than the other in a vibrato-free environment. When the oboists switched to caccia instruments, the duet timbres sounded unharnessed, their support tending to detract from the soloist.
As a central duo, Michael Leighton Jones’s Christus and Robert Macfarlane’s Evangelist made fine partners. Peter Tregear accounted for the bass arias with precise pitching and insistent accents, while the other three soloists enjoyed passages of fair quality. Unfailingly consistent accounts of the massive top-and-tail choral movements, reinforced by a laudably willing boys’ choir in part 1, raised the long afternoon’s achievement level considerably.
Tuesday, 19 April 2011, The Australian [Sydney], n.p.
Harmonic breakdowns overshadow and otherwise admirable venture
Chris Boyd
IN the margins of Puccini’s manuscript score for La Boheme, Mimi’s death is marked by a skull and crossbones.
Christ’s death in later versions of Bach’s St Matthew Passion is marked by nothing more than a gasp from the organ. In this performance, that mortal gasp was followed by a prolonged and perfect silence, mercifully unpunctuated by coughing or the rustling of librettos. That awe-inspiring silence was one of the more dramatic moments in an ambitious and risky venture that combined period and non-period instruments as well as period and non-period choirs.
Instead of a clash of thirds and sixths, as we might have expected, the meshing of the choirs was rarely less than felicitous. More often than not it was glorious. (One assumes that Ensemble Gombert has had more practice adapting to modern tunings and a variety of temperings than the other choirs have had.) Instrumentally, for the most part the lion and the lamb snuggled up together, too: the excellent viola da gamba sat well with the cellos, the violone with the double bass. Only the woodwinds sat in mutinous isolation.
Yet there were three clear instances when this performance came off the rails. The first was in the opening, when the massed orchestral forces generated a muddy and ugly sound. The second, just short of the climax of part one, was marked by some treacherous phrasing in the oboes. The third, near the end of the performance, was a tug of war between the bassoon-like fagotto and oboe da caccia on one side and the strings and voices on the other. Caught in the middle was singer Peter Tregear, whose light bass was pitched somewhere in between the competing armies. The timing and magnitude of these breakdowns in harmony overshadowed what was otherwise an admirable performance.
Robert Macfarlane as the Evangelist has the heroic tenor, agile and youthful, one would kill to hear in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. His singing was a delight. Lynette Alcantara brought genuine emotion to the alto solo. With great skill and tact, Siobhan Stagg began the soprano solo with a treble-like tone, then opened her voice to bring a more womanly presence, as required. Even Katherine Norman’s contribution – just a single sung line as the first maid – was bewitching.
On double bass, Kirsty McCahon was a vital presence. And Jeremy Summerly’s confidence-inspiring conducting was precise and economical. It was a shame he didn’t tune up one more time.