Saturday, 24 May 2008, 8 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Subscription Concert 3
The compositional output of the prolific Lassus includes many cycles — for example, the Sacrae lectiones novem ex propheta Iob, the Psalmi Davidis poenitentiales, and two sets of Hieremiae prophetae lamentationes. Just days before his death, Lassus completed a setting of the twenty-one ottava stanzas of Tansillo’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of Saint Peter), a work described by scholar James Haar as “one of the most remarkable artistic testaments in the history of music”. Earlier and shorter, but no less remarkable in their own way, are the Prophetiae Sibyllarum (Prophecies of the Sibyls), perhaps Lassus’s most significant essay in chromaticism.
PROGRAM
Orlande de Lassus Prophetiae Sibyllarum
Orlande de Lassus Lagrime di San Pietro
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Jennifer Mathers | Peter Campbell | Kieran Rowe |
| Carol Veldhoven | Belinda Wong | Tim Van Nooten | Julien Robinson |
| Fiona Seers | Niki Ebacioni | Vaughan McAlley | Tim Daly |
| Kathryn Pisani | Gowri Rajendran | Stuart Tennant | |
| Maria Pisani | |||
| Claerwen Jones |
REVIEW
Tuesday, 27 May 2008, The Age [Melbourne], page 13.
Ensemble in assured rendition of Prophecies
Clive O’Connell
IN THE middle of its annual subscription series, the Ensemble Gombert concentrated on Renaissance protean
composer Orlande de Lassus, presenting two major works from either end of his career: the Prophecies of the
Sibyls and the Tears of St Peter. Because of the Messiaen festival in St Patrick’s Cathedral, I was able to hear
only the 12-section setting of the verses purporting to foretell the coming and life of Christ.
While much of the popular music of Lassus falls on the ear with bracing sweetness when placed in the
company of his contemporaries, the language of the Prophecies holds a startling amount of chromatic shifts, a
device prefigured in Lassus’ own introductory verses and that parts of the following segments live up to
vigorously. Not that these sideways slips held many challenges for the Gombert singers, who are well-versed
in much more arcane material.
Further, the work asks for four vocal lines only and so the full energy of the Gombert sopranos and tenors
reinforced the deliberation of Lassus’ word-setting, which rarely involves repetition but proceeds through
each stanza with a time-conserving rigour. Still, the uninterrupted flow of the work showed this admirable
body in fine voice, if nowhere near fully stretched technically or interpretively.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age