Category: Concerts

Saturday, 4 August 2007, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 3

The English choral repertory, it seems, is always in fashion. Representing the Golden Age is Mundy’s intricate Vox Patris caelestis, sandwiched between two of the era’s best-loved works by Taverner and Tye. From the past century we have a Bach-inspired Magnificat from Stanford, some wonderful settings of great English poetry by Vaughan Williams and Britten, and two remarkable Hymns by the modern Tavener.

PROGRAM

John Taverner Dum transisset Sabbatum
William MundyVox Patris caelestis
Christopher Tye Missa Euge bone
Charles Villiers Stanford Magnificat for Double Chorus
Ralph Vaughan Williams Three Shakespeare Songs
Benjamin Britten Five Flower Songs
John Tavener Two Hymns to the Mother of God

SOPRANO	ALTO	TENOR	BASS
Deborah Summerbell	Jennifer Mathers	Peter Campbell	Julien Robison
Carol Veldhoven	Belinda Wong	Tim Van Nooten	Philip Nicholls
Fiona Seers	Niki Ebacioni	Frank Prain	Tom Reid
Kathryn Pisani	Heather Gaunt	Stuart Tennant	Jerzy Kozlowski
Maria Pisani
Claerwen Jones

 

REVIEWS

Tuesday, 7 August 2007, The Age [Melbourne], page 14
Rare airing for Russian master’s revolutionary work
Clive O’Connell

[…MSO Review…]
AT THE latest Ensemble Gombert recital, director John O’Donnell divided his program into two discrete
halves, both consisting of English church music.
The first dealt with three Tudor composers, including William Mundy’s ornate motet Vox Patris caelestis and
the Euge bone mass by Christopher Tye. These works, with Taverner’s Dum transisset Sabbatum, exemplify
the Gomberts’ normal playing field and once again they showed the haunting gravity of their communal
timbre.
While the sopranos retain their penetrating clarity, this occasion demonstrated the high quality in the male
ranks, with Peter Campbell and Tim van Nooten’s confident tenors balancing the impressive stateliness of
Jerzy Kozlowski’s bass.
The group then took a 350-year leap forward to the 1919 Magnificat by Stanford for double choir, which
sounded most persuasive in its Bach-indebted opening and closing strophes, if somehow underpowered in the
central segments. O’Donnell also led his forces in Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs and the Five
Flower Songs by Benjamin Britten.
Concluding the night with a living composer, the ensemble sang Two Hymns to the Mother of God written in
1985 by John Tavener. This wound up a long journey from the assertive certainty of the first great school of
British music to the unexpected Orthodox strain assumed by the country’s leading religious music exponent.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

 

Wednesday, 8 August 2007, Herald-Sun [Melbourne], page 57.
ENSEMBLE GOMBERT
Anna McAlister

ENSEMBLE Gombert’s Taverner to Tavener program explored British a cappella choral music from the 16th
and 20th centuries.
Interestingly, the composers John Taverner (born 1490-ish) and John Tavener (born 1944) are not just
namesakes with an R to differentiate; they are distantly related.
Taverner’s gorgeous Dum transisset Sabbatum began a concert of strikingly polished and controlled
performances. The 18-piece choir displayed consistently honed balance, the sopranos never unsubtle, the
basses tantalisingly present.
Under director John O’Donnell they moved flawlessly together and individual voices formed perfectly
blended sections. Though each vocal line ebbed and flowed dynamically, the volume range was compact
throughout. The result was pure, clear and warm, the soprano voices flatteringly airbrushed.
Vaughan-Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs and Britten’s Five Flower Songs were the only secular works
on the program.
In the first Shakespeare song, Full Fathom Five, the close dissonances were spot-on for pitch and they
resonated and decayed, convincingly bell-like, at the end.
A personal favourite was Tavener’s Two Hymns to the Mother of God (1985). The texture felt
three-dimensional: continuous shimmering chords in the inner voices (again pitched to perfection) seemed
like a current of warm air suspending melodies in the soprano and bass lines.

Saturday, 9 September 2006, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 4

Michael Praetorius was of the opinion that music had reached its perfection in his day amongst Protestant German composers (presumably himself included). This program allows us to consider his claim as we experience one of his most brilliant double-choir chorales along with settings of Psalm 116 by two of his contemporaries. These works are followed by two undisputed masterpieces, Schütz’s remarkable Musicalische Exequien, a German Requiem pre-dating Brahms’ by over two centuries, and Bach’s much-loved motet Jesu, meine Freude.

Program
Johann Hermann Schein	Das ist mir lieb
Christoph Demantius	Das ist mir lieb
Michael Praetorius	Jesaia dem Propheten das geschah
Heinrich Schütz	Musicalische Exequien
Johann Sebastian Bach	Jesu, meine Freude

SOPRANO	ALTO	TENOR	BASS
Deborah Summerbell	Jennifer Mathers	Peter Campbell	Alexander Roose
Carol Veldhoven	Belinda Wong	Tim Van Nooten	Philip Nicholls
Fiona Seers	Niki Ebacioni	Vaughan McAlley	Tom Reid
Kathryn Pisani	Rebecca Woods	Stuart Tennant	Tim Daly
Maria Pisani
Claerwen Jones

 

REVIEWS

Tuesday, 15 September 2006, The Age [Melbourne], page 15.
German Baroque goes a cappella as Mozart continues to please
Clive O’Connell

THIS week, the Ensemble Gombert leaves on its second tour of Europe and Saturday night’s recital served as
a fair illustration of the a cappella ensemble’s current state of practice. In a program of German Baroque
music, the singers were put through some difficult paces by director John O’Donnell, really extended in the
Musicalishe Exequien by Schutz: a far-ranging compendium of texts about death, set with imaginative
freedom and breadth.
These exequies conclude with a chordal motet and a short fusing of the Song of Simeon with verses from the
Apocalypse and the Book of Wisdom. The main part is a lengthy concerto alternating full choir and solo
voices, which showed off some of the Gomberts as individuals. Not all were uniformly successful in exposed
roles but these interpolated sentences for small groups achieved the composer’s aim of using the concerto
format – opposing small groups with large mass – and O’Donnell kept the work moving rapidly and sustained
the high standards of vocal colour, balance and security that distinguish this body.
The program began with a psalm setting by Schein, an idiosyncratic Sanctus by Praetorius, and ended with
Bach’s famous five-voice motet, Jesu, meine Freude, notable for a crystal-clear account of the central fugue,
here handled with telling sprightliness. […]
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age