Saturday, 2 March 2002, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Subscription Concert 1
The Sistine Chapel, private chapel of the Pope, has attracted some of the finest composers of liturgical music over the ages, especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance choirbooks of the chapel have been well preserved: scholars regularly peruse these grand tomes in an ongoing searchfor further knowledge of the music and its performance. All four composers represented in this program were at various times employed in the chapel as both singers and composers. Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli remains one of the golden favourites of the era.
PROGRAM
Josquin Desprez Ave Maria
Josquin Desprez Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria
Josquin Desprez Benedicta es, caelorum Regina
Costanzo Festa Magnificat septimi toni
Costanzo Festa Ave Regina caelorum
Cristóbal de Morales O sacrum convivium
Cristóbal de Morales Lamentabatur Jacob
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Missa Papae Marcelli
Note: Morales ‘Emendemus in melius’ was advertised in the subscription brochure but not performed.
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Jenny George | Peter Campbell | Jonathan Wallis |
| Carol Veldhoven | Jennifer Mathers | Tim Van Nooten | Thomas Drent |
| Fiona Seers | Susie Furphy | Vaughan McAlley | Sam Furphy |
| Claerwen Jones | Barbara Tattam | Stuart Tennant | Andrew Fysh |
| Maria Pisani | |||
| Helen Gagliano |
–
REVIEW
Tuesday, 6 March 2002, The Age [Melbourne], page 4, The Culture.
Uplifting portrait of the spiritual in art
Clive O’Connell
What strikes you afresh each time Ensemble Gombert begins its yearly round is not just how good the group
is but how it maintains such a high standard despite changes in personnel, albeit slight ones.
The body’s impeccably contoured and carefully mixed timbres returned to Melbourne on Saturday night, once
again sweeping all before them, staking Gombert’s claim to being the finest interpreter in the country of a
cappella Renaissance music.
Once again, you are left wondering if we are likely to hear singing of this quality from visiting choirs. In fact,
guest organisations that used to visit Australia to exhibit their choral wares are becoming thinner on the
ground, possibly because quite a few rely heavily on advance publicity built on historical reputation rather
than current ability. Another reason is that their demonstrations of expertise often fall flat when local bodies
like Ensemble Gombert sing just as well, if not better.
This is not simple-minded jingoism, the my-choir-right-or-wrong argument. Certainly, there are glitches in
the Gombert fabric every so often and the group’s performances are not always recording-studio perfect. But
then, the choir treats audience members as fellow discoverers, moving off a path all too well beaten by
others, taking on many of the most challenging early and late Renaissance pieces.
The group does not stick, year-in, year-out, with the familiar stock-in-trade that you can hear from many
British (or Australian) cathedral choirs with entrenched musical traditions.
On Saturday, director John O’Donnell led his 18 singers in works written by former members of or composers
for the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel choir, progressing over roughly an 80-year period from Josquin’s four-voice
Ave Maria to the sunburst clarity of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, the composer’s object lesson in
making sense of the mass without sacrificing that breathtaking amplitude of timbral fabric achieved by the
great masters of the High Renaissance.
O’Donnell and his collaborators presented an even reading of this music, maintaining a sensitivity to the ebb
and flow of linear interplay, that dazzling polyphonic extroversion typical of Mediterranean church music in
the 16th century.
Nobody pushed the pace or “pointed” notes for cheap dramatic effect and the choir’s treatment of dynamics
moved in direct relationship to the texts and the composer’s disposition of parts.
There are always difficulties in these transparent works, problems that singers manage in various styles. For instance, the Palestrina Mass pushes both sets of tenor parts pretty high; with only four singers at his disposal,
O’Donnell asked for a light and floating attack, rather than the customary bellow employed to make the notes
“count” at exposed moments. Yet, beyond the technical craft and welding of the available vocal possibilities,
where Ensemble Gombert takes precedence is in its communication of this music’s transcendental beauty.
In the slow-moving majesty of Lamentabatur Jacob by Morales or Josquin’s ardent Benedicta es, caelorum
Regina, the choir offers a sonorous realisation of the spiritual in art, a physical depiction of the insights that
visited mystics like St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila.
This is far from a superficial exercise, the kind of thing others achieve by playing around with timbres for
effect.
For one thing, the Xavier Chapel offers the audience pretty close quarters for observation and what strikes
you time and again about this ensemble is its focus on the task at hand; there is simply no time for anything
but producing the best possible sound. Indeed, performed properly, this style of music moves too quickly for
anything like self-indulgence.
Which may point to the exceptional quality of Ensemble Gombert. Even with a limited number of voices,
there are few moments when you can detect the sound of an individual singer; each member is subsumed in
the totality of the choir’s output.
That is probably the strongest testament to O’Donnell’s realised vision of how this music should sound, as
well as proof of the group’s strong collaborative character and its members’ superlative musicianship.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age