Category: Concerts

Saturday, 28 May 2005, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 2

We are ignorant of the exact date of Thomas Tallis’s birth, but circa 1505 has long been accepted, and half a millenium after the event, the possibility that we are a year or two out is of little significance. Concert Two is a selection of pieces from the simplest (the four-voice anthem If ye love me) to the most complex (the celebrated forty-voice Spem in alium), and from the most luxuriant (the six-voice Marian motet Gaude gloriosa) to the most austere (the moving five-voice Lamentations).

PROGRAM

Thomas Tallis Third Mode Melody (Why fum’th in sight)
Thomas Tallis If ye Love me
Thomas Tallis I Call and Cry to thee
Thomas Tallis Jesu salvator saeculi
Thomas Tallis Loquebantur variis linguis
Thomas Tallis Gaude gloriosa
Thomas Tallis Lamentations
Thomas Tallis Spem in alium (à 40)

Guest Singers for Spem in Alium:
Soprano: Larissa Cairns, Sally Watt
Alto: Barbara Johnson, Melissa Lee
Tenor: Tim Bell, Adrian Palmer, Robert Parbs, Frank Prain
Baritone: Barney Ellis, Joel Gladman, Tom Henry, Grantley McDonald, Peter Neustupny, Julien Robinson, John Weretka
Bass: Matthew Champion, Nicholas Cowall, Steven Hodgson, Julian Liberto, Martin Strauss

REVIEWS

Monday, 30 May 2005, The Australian [Sydney], page 16.
Sacred songs set the spirit soaring
Martin Ball

THIS year marks 500 years since the birth of Thomas Tallis, the greatest English composer of the Tudor
period. To mark the anniversary, Ensemble Gombert presented a “Quincentennial Celebration” of Tallis
covering a range of his sacred music for unaccompanied choir: from the simple four-part anthem If ye love me, keep my commandments, to the majestic 40-part motet, Spem in alium.

Ensemble Gombert is the perfect group to give such a concert. Formed in 1990 by respected organist and scholar John O’Donnell, the 20-member ensemble specialises not just in the music of the 16th century, but also in the details of period-performance practice.

The most significant aspect of this is intonation, with their preference for mean over equal temperament. But it also expresses itself in an emphasis on purity of tone rather than expressive colour or interpretation. At times one could imagine more vigour in performance, but this conservative rationale keeps the focus firmly on the music, rather than on the performers.

The program began with a setting of Psalm 2, Why fumeth in sight, perhaps best known to contemporary
audiences as the basis of Vaughan-Williams’s Fantasy on a theme of Thomas Tallis. Ensemble Gombert immediately established a beautiful tone, with perfectly balanced weight of treble and bass. O’Donnell’s decision to cut short the penultimate phrase in each stanza added some energy to the reading, but might have been better executed with fewer hasty breaths. Gaude gloriosa is a long, laudatory hymn to the Virgin Mary, with a lot of work for individual voices. Here the stamina of some of the singers, soprano in particular, seemed to flag, and the ensemble sound varied considerably in tone and colour.

There were no such problems in the two settings of the Lamentations, however, where the exquisite tone and rhythm were perfectly matched to the melancholic text. Finally Ensemble Gombert was joined by a further 20 singers for the marvel that is Spem in alium. O’Donnell arranged the choir in a horseshoe shape, as Tallis apparently intended, so that the music travels around the ine of singers, and is thrown back and forth between them in the large tuttis. There was a tremendous sense of a rolling sea of music, as the voices echoed around the soaring cupola of Xavier College Chapel. This is music that is worth all the celebrating it can get, even 500 years later.

Tuesday, 31 May 2005, The Age [Melbourne], page 8, Metro.
Hunter-Bradley and Sky-Lucas bring Baroque to life
Clive O’Connell

TO CELEBRATE the possible 500th birthday of Thomas Tallis (born around 1505), the Ensemble Gombert
and director John O’Donnell presented A Quingentennial Celebration to a packed audience.
For the non-Tallis experts, O’Donnell and the Gomberts began easily with the setting of Psalm 2, Why
fumeth in sight, which Vaughan Williams employed for his famous Fantasia; the brief and always touching If ye love me; and some Latin settings showing the father of English choral music’s facility at pleasing both Catholic and Anglican heads of state.

The most substantial of these was Gaude gloriosa, a hymn of praise to the Virgin and also probably to Queen Mary I; a very substantial tribute for a lady about to cause havoc. As well, we heard the two Lamentations settings, which cast a long shadow over other settings, British-made or European.
Finally, the numbers were enlarged to perform the huge four-part motet Spem in alium, which is a mighty delight when everyone is in action, but which showed some creaking seams when the texture thinned out …
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 19 March 2005, 8 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 1
ABC Classic FM Direct Broadcast

This is the first Australian performance of Arvo Pärt’s most recent large-scale choral work, commissioned for the 750th anniversary of Cologne Cathedral in 1998. The work is a setting of the complete text of the Canon of Repentance, attributed to St Andrew of Crete (c. 660–740).

PROGRAM

Arvo Pärt Kanon pokajanen (Canon of Repentance) [Australian première]

REVIEW

Tuesday, 22 March 2005, The Age [Melbourne], page 8.
Gombert diligent; Kooyong ambitious
Clive O’Connell

GOING in for the Lenten spirit hoots and all, the Ensemble Gombert, directed by John O’Donnell, sang the
90-minute-long Canon of Repentance by Arvo Part, a setting of odes and shorter poems by St Andrew of
Crete, which is one of the penitential prayers of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Sung in Church Slavonic, the Canon moves slowly, but the prayer/poems are interwoven with doxologies and
repeated versicles that give the linguistically challenged listener some reference points.
Facing one of their largest audiences in recent years, the Gombert singers produced a remarkably clean
performance, especially the ensemble’s sopranos and tenors who were often exposed and whose accuracy was tested by sudden attacks on high notes.
Balancing the score’s wearing length, the work contains much repetition of musical material. This is not just
in the intervening versicles, which restore a kind of calm between the self-abasing verses, but also inside the
odes, where repeated verbal material brought in its train the same (or similar) vocal settings.
However, the group of 24 responded with professional diligence to Part’s demands, staying true to pitch and
producing page after page of steady declamation. A few early coarse notes from the tenors aside, the
full-textured choral mix maintained a steady balance, punctuated by passages for small groups, particularly in
Ode VIII, which had a remarkably affecting impact.
The work is something of an ordeal for the performers and listeners, with only a few outbursts of little drama
to break up the even hieratic flow of choral timbre.
Part’s Canon pursues its grave purpose with the same intense serenity and severity as Gregorian chant, its
harmonic structure both mobile and restrained. The Greek saint’s rich language of contrition and
self-abasement is given prime importance in this work of implacable devotion. […]
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 18 December 2004, 8pm
Sunday, 19 December 2004, 2.30pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew
Also performed at St Ambrose, Woodend, Saturday 12 December

Subscription Concert 5
ABC Classic FM Direct Broadcast

Finally, this year’s Christmas to Candlemas features, in addition to a selection of Renaissance works, Benjamin Britten’s youthful masterpiece, A Boy was Born. Composed when he was 19, the work made Britten a household name throughout Britain literally overnight, with the BBC’s broadcast on 23 February 1934.

PROGRAM

Josquin Desprez O admirabile commercium
Nicolas Gombert O magnum mysterium
Michael Praetorius Resonet in laudibus
Richard Dering Quem vidistis, pastores
Jacob Handl Mirabile mysterium
Orlande de Lassus Omnes de Saba venient
Tomás Luis de Victoria Senex puerum portabat
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Nunc dimittis
Benjamin Britten A Boy was Born

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Additional “Trebles” for A Boy was Born:
Michèle de Courcy, Nina Pereira, Sally Watt

REVIEW

Tuesday, 21 December 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Gomberts take the road less travelled, splendidly
Clive O’Connell

FAR removed from the Myer windows model of celebrating Christmas that focuses on fictional characters or
a recent children’s fad, the Ensemble Gombert follows a harder road.
No Silent Night or Good King Wenceslas for this group; rather, the singers go to the highest achievements of
Western polyphonic music, celebrations of the happy season, but couched in a musical vocabulary that asks
more of the listener than an easy surge of sentimentality.
The Gomberts opened their tour of the feastdays that run from Christmas Eve to the Presentation of Christ in
the Temple with Josquin’s complex motet O admirabile commercium, which hymns the extraordinary
exchange of Godhead for human form and manages to sum up the whole wonder of Christ’s birth with a calm
ecstasy in which the music’s dynamic hovers somewhere between the rhapsodic text and the ebb and flow of
the vocal interplay.
What followed this initial gambit was a kind of digest of Renaissance musical art, vaulting from the broadly
spread consonances of Praetorius in a jubilant Resonet in laudibus to the fierce chromaticisms found in Jacob
Handl’s Mirabile mysterium for the Feast of the Circumcision, a motet that juxtaposes chords in unexpected
contexts just as the words speak of the paradox of Christ’s position in the world both as child and master of
creation.
As well, the group expounded their namesake’s setting of O magnum mysterium, which deals with the images
of the stable in Bethlehem through a finely crafted expression of delight and stalwart confidence.
The opening section of the afternoon ended with the rich mastery of Lassus picturing the Magi adoring
Christ, Victoria’s tense Senex puerum portabat, the whole sequence climaxing in Palestrina’s opulent 12-part
Nunc dimittis – an overwhelming fabric that ended all too quickly.
Jumping abruptly to contemporary times, the Gomberts sang a full-bodied and generally confident account of
Britten’s A Boy was Born, written when the composer was 19 and serving as his calling-card on the British
musical establishment. The work’s difficulties – intense seconds and sevenths, gruff bass lines, layers of text
and linear disjunctions – are enough to tax any choir.
But these musicians met its challenges with their customary sangfroid, responding, with a will, to John
O’Donnell’s intense direction.
Clive O’Conell/Courtesy of The Age

Sunday, 14 November 2004, 2.30pm
Hawthorn Town Hall, Burwood Road, Hawthorn

The Mozart Collection 2004
presented by The Academy of Melbourne

PROGRAM

Johannes Brahms Motets Op. 74, No.1 & Op. 109 [performed by Ensemble Gombert]
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 [performed by The Melbourne Symphonic Chorus]

–
Additional singers for Beethoven (to comprise the Melbourne Symphonic Chorus):
SOPRANO: Michèle de Courcy, Cecilia Harkin, Jacqueline James, Nina Pereira, Andrea Reichert, Sally Watt
ALTO: Barbara Beer, Sophie Chapman, Alice O’Kane, Leonie Tonkin
TENOR: Tim Bell, Joel Gladman, Robert Parbs, Frank Prain, Louise Tunbridge
BASS: Richard Bolitho, Nicholas Carter, Mark Dulfer, Ken Falconer, Geoff Millar, Peter Neustupny, Julien Robinson, Martin Strauss, Roderick Vance

The Academy of Melbourne
Brett Kelly – artistic director & conductor
Michael Kisin – leader

REVIEW

Tuesday, 16 November 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Kelly gang in raid on Beethoven
Clive O’Connell

BEETHOVEN’S Choral Symphony saw Academy of Melbourne artistic director Brett Kelly call on
members of Orchestra Victoria and well-known freelancers to assist his usual ensemble – itself made up of
many Melbourne Symphony Orchestra musicians.
For choral forces, we heard the excellent Ensemble Gombert and friends as the Melbourne Symphonic
Chorus – about 40 singers in all. And Kelly was well endowed with the four essential soloists: soprano
Merlyn Quaife, mezzo Lynlee Williams, tenor Adrian McEniery and bass Ian Cousins.
John O’Donnell conducted a brief first half, his Ensemble Gombert singing four choral works by Brahms,
beginning with the popular Warum ist das Licht gegeben, followed by the three Fest und Gedenkspruche –
works which the choir has sung recently in a program of Brahms’ a cappella religious music. The close
acoustics of this hall gave an insight into the group’s reliability and fearlessness, qualities that tend to be
forgotten in the flattering surrounds of its home base at Xavier Chapel.
Kelly took a bluff approach to the symphony’s first three movements, hammering out the first movement’s
craggy contours with little room for metaphysical musing. The following scherzo moved at startling speed,
timpani and strings hard pressed to get their notes out cleanly.
Opening the famous choral finale, Cousins made a wobbly start to the opening recitative, but soon recovered
for a firm outlining of the movement’s major theme. Kelly encouraged his orchestra during the opening
choral gambits, so the choristers’ impact was muted, not helped by the stage’s framing curtains. A better
balance came after the soloists entered in the second stanza and the often awkward Seid umschlungen
segment moved past less cumbersomely than in readings heard here during the past 15 years.
Next year, the Academy is taking a sabbatical, drawing breath to shore up their approach and support. Apart
from one major performance in November, the first we will hear from this estimable body comes after its
regrouping in a full 2006 season; a disappointment for Academy admirers but clearly a vital developmental
step.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 6 November 2004, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 4

Concert 4 consists of 21 items from the Cantiones sacrae published by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in 1575. Each contributed 17 motets to the collection, presumably celebrating the seventeenth year of the reign of Elizabeth I, to whom it is dedicated.

PROGRAM

Thomas Tallis Te lucis ante terminum (2 settings)
Thomas Tallis Salvator mundi
Thomas Tallis Miserere nostri
Thomas Tallis In jejunio et fletu
Thomas Tallis Derelinquat impius
Thomas Tallis In manus tuas
Thomas Tallis Dum transisset Sabbatum
Thomas Tallis Candidi facti sunt Nazarei
Thomas Tallis O nata lux
Thomas Tallis Suscipe quaeso
William Byrd Attollite portas
William Byrd Miserere mihi, Domine
William Byrd Emendemus in melius
William Byrd Memento homo
William Byrd Tribue, Domine
William Byrd Siderum rector
William Byrd Laudate, pueri, Dominum
William Byrd O lux, beata Trinitas

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REVIEW

Thursday, 11 November, The Age [Melbourne], page 6, A3.
Gombert’s Precision; ACO’s dash
Clive O’Connell

BACK from their first European tour, the Ensemble Gombert singers worked through two brackets of Tudor
motets by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. Touring the composers’ ground-breaking joint publication,
Cantiones sacrae, the program comprised about two-thirds of that volume’s contents.
John O’Donnell and his gifted group presented both ends of the English Renaissance musical
spectrum – from the brief and plaintive Miserere nostri, Domine by Tallis, to the exhausting, imaginative
vaults in Byrd’s Tribue, Domine. Yet again, the group demonstrated its precision of pitch and enunciation, the
sinewy arches of this marvellous polyphony holding as firm as the flying buttresses they mimic.
The fiercely difficult Dum transisset Sabbatum by Tallis requires the first sopranos to sing continuously at the
top of their range. Despite some anxious moments, this gripping work swept to a secure conclusion.
[…]
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 17 July 2004, 8 pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 3

Concert 3 is a repeat of our very first subscription program from March 1995, a smorgasbord of polyphony from the High Renaissance to the Late Baroque.

PROGRAMS

Josquin Desprez Ave Maria
Josquin Desprez  Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria
Josquin Desprez  Benedicta es, caelorum Regina
Nicolas Gombert Regina caeli laetare
Philippe de Monte Super flumina Babylonis
William Byrd Quomodo cantabimus
Carlo Gesualdo Responsoria: Sabbato Sancto — In ij Noct.
1. ‘Recessit pastor noster’
2. ‘O vos omnes’
3. ‘Ecce quomodo moritur justus’
Johann Sebastian Bach Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

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REVIEWS

Tuesday, 20 July 2004, The Age [Melbourne], page 13, A3
Gomberts in excellent form; Crellin reliable
Clive O’Connell

On the verge of their first overseas tour, the Ensemble Gombert is in excellent form, showing its high
performance level plainly at Saturday’s Paragons of Polyphony recital. The program, offered as one long
stretch of sonorous fabric, began with three Marian motets by Josquin and ended with the exhausting Singet
dem Herrn by Bach for double choir.
But the central parts of the evening gave the most fruitful rewards. First, the group’s namesake constructed a
rich complex of 12 lines in his Regina caeli laetare, brought to a splendid realisation by these 18 singers
whose interpretation of the harmonic clashes of the motet’s second half generated the kind of assured
professionalism heard from no other Australian choir of this type.
Philippe de Monte’s Catholic lament Super flumina Babylonis and the more uncomfortably situated
Englishman Byrd’s response demonstrated the group’s talent at realising such emotionally sophisticated
music’s drama without resorting to over-hyped dynamics or adding cosmetic touches to the steady polyphonic
mesh.
Even in three of the Responsoria for Holy Saturday by the arch-mannerist Gesualdo, O’Donnell and the
Gomberts took a measured approach, leaving the composer’s surprising chromatic slips and slides to speak
for themselves as sincere illustrations of the noble texts. The Gomberts’ ability to handle this kind of intense,
demanding work should generate enthusiasm on their European circuit.
Clive O’Connell/Courtesy of The Age

Saturday, 15 May 2004, 8pm
Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Road, Kew

Subscription Concert 2

Concert 2 is made up of double-choir works old and new. Following the success of our venture into Brahms in 2003 we are extending our German Romantic repertoire with Psalms of Mendelssohn; and Frank Martin’s celebrated double-choir Mass is one of our two twentieth century offerings for the year.

PROGRAM

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Stabat mater
Michael Praetorius Christus, der uns selig macht
Michael Praetorius Gott der Vater wohn uns bei
Johann Sebastian Bach Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf
Felix Mendelssohn Drei Psalmen, Opus 78
1. ‘Warum toben die Heiden’
2. ‘Richte mich, Gott’
3. ‘Mein Gott, warum’
Frank Martin Mass for Double Choir

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REVIEW

Wednesday, 19 May 2004,The Age [Melbourne], page 8, A3.
Two artforms, two choirs, twice the work
Joel Crotty

[…]
ENSEMBLE Gombert have garnered a solid reputation for their performances of unaccompanied choral
music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This time around, the 18 voices, under the direction of
John O’Donnell (pictured), moved into the 19th and 20th centuries. Mendelssohn’s Drei Psalmen op. 78 and
Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir proved to be the stand-out works of the event.
The solos in the Mendelssohn were superbly handled, as was the vocal blend in the long stretches of
homophonic writing. Equally as impressive was the reading of Martin’s Mass, helped in no small way by the
sympathetic acoustics of the Xavier College Chapel.
Double choir works can be tricky affairs to get right. The lack of balance between the two sets of choristers
can often lead to muddy interpretations. This was the unfortunate outcome for Praetorius’s Christus, der uns
selig macht and Gott der Vater wohn’ uns bei, and Bach’s Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf. Although the
struggle was there during those works, the choir was in top form throughout Palestrina’s Stabat mater.
Joel Crotty/Courtesy of The Age