Saturday, 12 September 2009, 8 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Subscription Concert 3
With Barber, Carter and Lauridsen we make our first foray into American music. Barber’s wonderful 1938 setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Leighton’s 1957 setting of the same poem, while Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia has been a long-standing request. The second half of the program features works by members of Ensemble Gombert, past and present.
PROGRAM
Elliott Carter Musicians Wrestle Everywhere
Morten Lauridsen O magnum mysterium
Samuel Barber God’s Grandeur
Kenneth Leighton God’s Grandeur
Benjamin Britten Hymn to St Cecilia
Peter Campbell Sunrise on the Coast [World première]
Vaughan McAlley In principio erat verbum [World première]
Vaughan McAlley Veritas de terra orta est [World première]
Calvin Bowman Missa Vexilla regis [World première] *
* Writing of this work was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council.
| SOPRANO | ALTO | TENOR | BASS |
| Deborah Summerbell | Belinda Wong | Peter Campbell | Julien Robinson |
| Carol Veldhoven | Jenny George | Tim van Nooten | Kieran Rowe |
| Fiona Seers | Niki Ebacioni | Vaughan McAlley | Chris Potter |
| Maria Pisani | Rebecca Woods | Stuart Tennant | Alistair Clark |
| Claerwen Jones | |||
| Kathryn Pisani |
REVIEW
Monday, 14 September 2009, The Age [Melbourne], page 14.
New is old as exemplary choir sings premieres
Clive O’Connell
It all depends on what you mean by “our time”, but the most recently written segments of the Ensemble
Gombert’s latest subscription recital sounded noticeably old-fashioned, if not antique.
After offering a small selection of American and British works, John O’Donnell and his exemplary choir sang
world premieres of short pieces by two of the Gombert tenor personnel.
First was Peter Campbell’s staid, only slightly adventurous Sunrise on the Coast, a setting of an A. B.
Paterson lyric; then came Vaughan McAlley’s responses to two Latin liturgical texts written in a vocabulary
recalling Renaissance masters and the Gabrielis’ Venice.
Calvin Bowman’s new Missa Vexilla regis uses parts of the eponymous plainchant and moves rapidly
through the familiar texts with a pleasure in candid sonorities, spiced by unexpected sideways harmonic
moves. Like his Australian colleagues on this night, Bowman avoids grinding dissonances, making this new
mass easy to assimilate.
The most contemporary-sounding music came in centenarian Elliott Carter’s Musicians Wrestle Everywhere,
a bristling 1945 mesh of polyphonic devices, against which Britten’s almost contemporary Hymn to St Cecilia
sounded tame, if rather rushed in this performance.
But the most affecting music-making emerged during two juxtaposed settings of the Hopkins sonnet God’s
Grandeur by Samuel Barber and Kenneth Leighton: similar but individual, sung with evenly spread
accomplishment right through to their spell-binding final bars.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age