Saturday, 30 November 2013, at 4.30pm
Newman College Chapel, 887 Swanston Street, Parkville
Newman College 2013 Advent Festival
Australia’s leading Renaissance choir, Ensemble Gombert, performs a Vespers service featuring polyphonic music from the cathedrals of Italy and Spain for the Feast of St Andrew.
Director, organ: John O’Donnell
| Program | |
|---|---|
| Organ Prelude: Intonazione del settimo tono Domine ad adjuvandum |
Andrea Gabrieli (1532/3–1585) Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi (c.1554–1609) |
| Dixit Dominus septimi toni |
Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi (c.1554–1609) |
| Laudate pueri octavi toni | Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) |
| Credidi octavi toni | Vincenzo Ruffo (c.1508–1587) |
| In convertendo octavi toni | Anonymous faux-bourdons adapted by John O’Donnell |
| Domine probasti me octavi toni | Costanzo Porta (1528/9–1601) |
| Intonazione del quarto tono | Andrea Gabrieli |
| Hymnus: Exsultet orbis | Gregorian chant with even-numbered verses as organ improvisations |
| Intonazione del primo tono | Andrea Gabrieli |
| Magnificat a 6 primi toni | Claudio Monteverdi |
| Organ Postlude: Andreas Christi famulus
|
Cristóbal de Morales ( c.1500–1553) Organ intabulation by John O’Donnell with soprano ostinato “Sancte Andrea, ora pro nobis” |
SINGERS
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Belinda Wong | Peter Campbell | Andrew Murray |
| Carol Veldhoven | Yi Wen Chin | Daniel Thomson | Thomas Bland |
| Katherine Norman | Niki Ebacioni | Vaughan McAlley | Thomas Baldwin |
| Kathryn Pisani | Rebecca Collins | Stuart Tennant | Mike Ormerod |
| Claerwen Jones |
–
REVIEW
Wednesday, 4 December 2013, The Age [Melbourne], n.p.
2013 Advent Festival, Newman College
Clive O’Connell
2013 Advent Festival
Consort Of Melbourne,
Ensemble Gombert, Early Voices
Newman College
November 20 – December 1
For this pre-Christmas musical feast, artistic director Gary Ekkel and his Melbourne University college hosted many of Melbourne’s early music ensembles specialising in liturgical choral music.
Over two days, participants were invited to take up roles as the program observed the monastic offices – matins, terce, sext, none, vespers – interspersed with lectures on Gregorian chant singing and religious art alongside interludes from violinist Rachael Beesley and guitarist Slava Grigoryan.
For Catholics, the weekend’s content provided much gratification, Proustian recollections sparked by polyphonic choral music and enough sung Latin to make the Second Vatican Council seem like a bad dream. Each day, the fulcrum event came in a Mass: Saturday’s Feast of St Andrew bringing the Consort of Melbourne to centre-altar for Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Assumpta est Maria setting of the Common, while observation of the first Sunday in Advent found Vivien Hamilton’s Early Voices singing the luminous Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, the work that allegedly legitimised contrapuntal writing for church ceremonies.
Using spartan resources – six singers, a string quartet, an organ – Ekkel produced a lean-textured, accurate reading of the Charpentier work with well-honed upper voices although the bass line sounded strained, the Credo a congenial, if long-winded, episode in a sequence that included Gregorian chant and motets by the French composer.
Later, the Ensemble Gombert sang the vespers but, without a program, I was unable to work out which composers were involved, although the general character suggested a late-Renaissance/early Baroque provenance.
The Palestrina Mass was given a straightforward account, even in temper and metre, Hamilton’s forces well served by the two tenor lines the work asks for and exercises heftily throughout.
But the main delight came in the music’s fluent, innate mastery, a reflection of the transcendent in contrast to the prosaic stolidity of the modern-day ritual itself.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age