Monday, 13 February 2017, 6pm
Melbourne Recital Centre – Salon
Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 (organ version)
Melbourne Recital Centre Local Heroes Series 2017
Claudio Monteverdi, Vespers of 1610 (organ version)
John O’Donnell, director & organ
Tickets: Please visit Melbourne Recital Centre
Singers
Soprano
Carol Veldhoven, Katherine Lieschke, Victoria Brown
Katharina Hochheiser, Claerwen Jones, Mandie Lee, Sarah Harris
Alto
Belinda Wong, Juliana Kay, Yi Wen Chin
Niki Ebacioni, Rebecca Collins
Tenor
Peter Campbell, Tim van Nooten
Vaughan McAlley, Michael Stephens, Stuart Tennant
Bass
Adrian Phillips, Nicholas Tolhurst
Mike Ormerod, Michael Strasser
REVIEW
15 February 2017, O’Connell the Music, [online]
A Classic Up Close
Clive O’Connell
MONTEVERDI VESPERS OF 1610
Ensemble Gombert
Melbourne Recital Centre
Monday February 13
Fitting the Vespers into the smaller of the Recital Centre’s spaces made for a pretty solid challenge. John O’Donnell used a version of the score that I’ve not heard before which does without the rich orchestral fabric of the full-scale version, reducing all Monteverdi’s support potential to a chamber organ, from which the body’s founder directed his 22-strong choir. In the Salon, we were all well-involved with the performance and quite a few faces that present as mere blips in the distance at Xavier College Chapel – the Gomberts’ usual theatre of action – took on added interest; not simply for being distinctive but also for the physical exertion involved in their labour, here seen at close range.
As you’d expect, the advantages of proximity for Monday night’s audience were balanced by some benefits for the singers. Primarily, the pressure involved in making the five psalms’ linear and chordal interplay resonate was alleviated by the fact that projection could be achieved with less strain than is required in a large church space. Yes, you lost an initial surge of excitement which bursts out at the opening to the full version where the composer revisits his Orfeo prelude with a massive instrumental array (as most performances present it) contesting with the choral forces. But every note carried and made its mark, and the choral fabric impressed for its lucidity: lines that usually get lost in the mesh could be discerned, even in pages like the 10-part Nisi Dominus.
In general, this performance succeeded most fully in the large-frame movements where all present were involved; the early Dixit Dominus and Laudate pueri impressed for the vivid power of the dozen female voices while the tenor thread in Lauda Jerusalem came over with a quietly resonant consistency, although the concluding doxology to this movement turned out to be the performance highlight for me, particularly striking for the precision of the off-beat entries during the last Amen pages.
The last time I heard this work, at the opening to the 2014 Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields Festival, conductor Gary Ekkel used soloists of some stature for the motet/concerto movements that interleave the psalms of these vespers. O’Donnell followed his usual practice of giving all solo lines to his Gombert members; although the choir was slightly expanded in size for this occasion, as far as I could tell everyone took part in the choral movements.
Much of the night’s weight fell on tenor Tim van Nooten who expounded the solo Nigra sum, shared the Duo Seraphim with Vaughan McAlley (and, later, with Peter Campbell) and took on the main burden of Audi coelum. His voice is hard to characterise: clean and carrying, not aggressive in attack, holding something of a countertenor’s detachment but without any stridency. The only noticeable problem – and that appeared mainly in his early solos – was a running-out of breath, so that the endings of certain phrases verged on the dangerously tenuous.
Carol Veldhoven, one of the Gombert veterans, worked impressively with Katherine Lieschke in the Pulchra es motet, and with commendable security in the concluding Magnificat a 6 where the same pair made a fair fist of Monteverdi’s echo effects. The bass soloist in the Laetatus sum psalm was competent and professional, but I couldn’t recognize him, even at close quarters.
Still, the individual singers gave the impression of being under stress during their moments of exposure; nothing came easy and, although correctly dutiful for the most part, they were at their most effective when moving back to reinforce the general population.
In this version, as well as missing the initial splendour of dotted-rhythm energy, you also do without the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria which comes close to the end and is one of the full work’s least effective movements despite (because of?) its simplicity. And the concluding Magnificat on this night was negotiated rapidly – the second of the two available, I believe. Yet the reading made for a satisfying and involving experience, drawing you in by the sheer grittiness of music-making being carried out within arm’s reach. You might have reservations about the soloists’ assurance but this choir in full flight has a vehemence and informed impulse that engrosses and can often enthral.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of O’Connell the Music
18 February 2017, Classic Melbourne, [online]
Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 (organ version)
Melbourne hasn’t exactly been starved of opportunities to hear Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, with performances by Newman College and Concerto Italiano in recent years. It was Ensemble Gombert’s duty to present something new in what has become a well-furrowed field, and they did this admirably by presenting the very rarely heard organ-only version of the Vespers in their recent Local Heroes concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre.
In one sense, one loses very little by hearing the Vespers in this configuration: most of the vocal music remains and was only ever intended to be accompanied by a continuo department, even if modern performances often lard this up by doubling voices with instruments. At another level, something pretty critical is lost, namely the lavish and virtuosic instrumentation with which listeners to the work have become familiar. But an unexpected gain is the six-part Magnificat, as Monteverdi more than makes up for the restriction in his palette with a setting that is remarkably different from the version most of us know.
Monteverdi’s intention in the Vespers seems to have been to show potential employers the full command he had both of conservative stile antico writing and the more progressive, Luzzaschi-derived moderno ‘recitative’ style that was very much in fashion in the courts and chambers of early seventeenth-century Italy. Monteverdi proved to be remarkably fluent in what was a very modern idiom at the time he wrote the Vespers, and it is probably the instances of that virtuosic style that draws most audiences to the Vespers. The stile moderno is eminently a soloist’s style and, as a result, it is critical that singers with the capacity to realise not just technical difficulties, but also the affective and rhetorical difficulties, form the quintet of soloists (two sopranos, two tenors and one bass) that constitute the core of the soloist group. The casting of the tenors in particular is critical, with two lengthy monodies (Nigra sum and Audi caelum) and two parts of a trio (Duo seraphim) forming the bulk of the virtuosic demands made on the singers.
The strongest of the soloists was Michael Strasser (bass) whose part, although important, occupies just a fraction of the soloists’ time. Strasser’s singing was confident, well produced, focussed, and characteristic — a line really worth listening to, even if at the bottom of the texture. Sopranos Carol Veldhoven and Katherine Lieschke did a creditable job with Pulchra es, but the fact that their voices point in quite different directions undermined the sinuous interweaving and interlocking that is supposed to characterise this movement. Lieschke was on finer form in her solo in the Magnificat.
The finest singers in the line-up for a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers need to be the two tenor soloists; Ensemble Gombert’s choice fell on two choristers, Vaughan McAlley and Tim van Nooten, the latter of whom took the two longer “concertos”, Nigra sum and Audi caelum. Both tenors largely got around the notes (itself a formidable challenge, and not one to be dismissed lightly), but neither gave the sense of the nonchalant ease Italians of the period called sprezzatura, nor of passionate commitment to sound or text. Duo seraphim, a conceptualisation in sound of what it would be like for two angels to call to each other across the vault of heaven, lacked a sense of ecstatic engagement.
Part of the difficulty the singers in general experienced with this music must be put down to the decision to perform at what seems to have been the high Italian pitch that was apparently common in Monteverdi’s day. In a work already notated in a punishing tessitura (the tenor soloists are largely singing in the top fourth of their voices), to take the music even higher in pitch served no one. The voices were cruelly pushed in ways that were unnecessary to the music. John O’Donnell’s direction was largely economical and commonsensical, but he was unwilling just to let moments of rhetoric sit — Duo seraphim’s transitions from three parts to one in the second part of the concerto was a moment in case, where the seam was just pasted over: one got no sense of how remarkable the Christian claim for the triune nature of God was. The magic of Monteverdi as a reader of texts resides in moments like these, and they should be played for all they are worth.
Ensemble Gombert may be many things, but it is not a choir of soloists. The strongest performances in the concert actually came from the massed body of the choir in the two psalms without soloists. Nisi Dominus was lucid, rhythmically incisive (tricky, given the density of the texture and the slow movement of the harmonies) and mobile. The Ensemble sang Lauda Jerusalem in a lower transposition, providing welcome relief for all, and it was a thrilling and engaged performance even at the lower pitch. Both of these psalms provide moments of contrast of mood at the doxology and I would have preferred a stronger change of gear to register this — a change of dynamic or a different vocal colour. But both see Monteverdi in the stile antico and, not coincidentally, the Ensemble on home territory, giving performances indicative of the Ensemble at its best.
John Weretka/Courtesy of Classic Melbourne