John Weretka

A visit of Canadian Baroque orchestra Tafelmusik to town (this is their third) is always a treat. The fact that the orchestra plays from memory is always mentioned as an index of their virtuosity; I’m mentioning it, here, to draw attention to the fact that it should rather be read as an index of their complete familiarity with their programs and, in particular, to praise the way it allows intra-ensemble communication to flourish. This is an orchestra in which all parts are aware of what all other parts are doing.  They dispense with sheet music but they also take the time to look at each other and enjoy the experience of playing. That joy is infectious and, almost apart from what they play, makes hearing andseeing them live such a pleasure.

Fortunately, the sheer skill of their music-making was matched in this concert by a program of music mostly by Bach. This was a pretty dense program (over twenty works in total) but almost nothing lasted long and no major work was presented in sequence or in its entirety, even if some larger works offered something of a spine to the program in total — the C major orchestral suite in the first half, a little bracket of music from the Goldberg variations in the second. Much of the music was presented come sta, just as Bach wrote it, but a reasonable portion was arrangements from various sources. I’m not averse to arrangements, particularly when the music selected is so fine, but I’m not convinced that these arrangements worked well. Some of the “arrangements” were merely stereophonic replications of the sections of a single work (the sarabande from the C major cello suite, the allemande from the violin partita in D minor) by multiple players, a bit of a hallmark of Tafelmusik’s programs.

Some pieces were actual arrangements. The opening arioso from Weichte nur, betrübte Schattenand sinfonia from Lobet Gott in seinen Reichenboth suffered in arrangement from an insufficient differentiation of the solo voice (in the former case) or choral lines (in the latter) from the orchestral body: in the latter, it was difficult to hear the very different character the chorus part has from the orchestral accompaniment. A further arrangement (Schafe können sicher weiden) transposed the soprano solo into the wrong octave, completely disfiguring the trio of high parts Bach really wants in this aria. In general, however, the playing was very accomplished and even very affecting: Wo zwei und drei versammelt sindwas quite ravishing; the two players of the cello suite movement and the four of the violin partita movement showed how two (or four) players can legitimately conceive the same music in different and equally moving ways. Notwithstanding the amount of movement, the ensemble showed quite little strain, even when the speed selected verged on the faster-than-thou and ran the risk of endangering coherence (e.g. the overture to the C major orchestral suite). The best playing of the even came from an unexpected quarter: normally relegated to continuo duties, Olivier Fortin shone in the sinfonia in G minor (BWV 797) and the prelude in C major (BWV 933).

Perusal of the program might have led the casual reader to expect the program had no particular narrative, but that was furnished by the lumièreaspect of this son et lumière exposition of Bach’s life and world conceived by the orchestra’s bass player, Alison Mackay. Actor/director Blair Williams did a fine, not too histrionic, job with a script that verged perilously close to that at times (I am still unable to find who wrote the script). The widest possible net was cast in telling Bach’s and his world’s story — the rise of Leipzig on the back of commerce, the mythic origins of stringed instruments, manufacture of instruments in Leipzig, Jews visiting the fair in the city, the Zimmerman coffee house and its concerts … and so on.  When we were shown a long bracket of pictures of sheep, supposedly to help us contextualise the production of gut strings, that I realised we had truly gone into off-road territory. Can a son et lumière   show work? I’m not sure, but this one distracted from the real show of the evening, a fine orchestra making great music from the scores of one of the greatest.

 John Weretka heard this concert on May 22 at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

At the helm of a quite large body of student musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music, Howard Penny directed a fairly dense program of bon-bons from the Baroque in its most expansive sense, stretching from the start of the seventeenth century until deep into the eighteenth century. This was a long program and, while some more substantial works were included — things such as one of the sonatas from Muffat’s Armonico tributoor one of the Handel concerti a due corior one of the C.P.E. Bach symphonies — the fact they are all made up of smaller segments really meant one only rarely heard longer paragraphs of music. To Penny’s credit, very little of the programme comprised bog-standard Baroque music, with maybe only the sinfonia from the second part of Bach’s Christmas oratorio    and a selection of pieces from the second Water music suite by Handel fitting that bill. Occasionally well-known composers were represented by lesser-known works, including Handel’s concerto a due coriand the overture to Jephtha, but much more frequently we were exposed to less well-known composers and even lesser-known works. The strike rate with these works was mixed: Praetorius’ Terpischoredances were, as always, unfailingly delightful; Zelenka’s Hypochondrieand overture to I penitenti al sepolchro del Redentorewere certainly interesting, even if I did not share Penny’s seemingly uncritical enthusiasm for them; but the Vejvanosky sonata was a pretty weak example of the kind of Venice-influence multi-partite sonata better represented by Bertali or Schmelzer (the latter represented on the program  by the balletto Di zingari).

I felt that the later the music was, the more attuned to the music the musicians seemed to be. Handel offered the securest ground, with muscular definition and incisive rhythm in the dramatic overture to Jephtha, control of the masses of sound in the concerto a due coriand elegance in the second Water musicsuite. Also fine was the sinfonia from the second Christmas oratoriocantata, with its braying quarter of double reeds. Zelenka’s Hypocondrie, with its sudden alternations of mood and juxtaposition of major and minor thirds, just hung together better than the frankly weird overture to I penitenti(maybe this overture makes more sense when not detached from its parent work?), but both were given strong, characterful and dramatic readings. The strongest of all among the eighteenth-century works was C.P.E. Bach’s symphony in F major, in which the musicians navigated the composer’s customary veering between the lyrical and the aphoristic with apparent ease.

The seventeenth-century works seemed less in the musicians’ home territory. The comparatively uninteresting Vejvanosky sonata and the Praetorius dances offered reasonably little for the musicians to sink their teeth into, but the Muffat sonata is core seventeenth-century expression. The tension between the two styles Muffat explores in this work should have offered rich pickings for the musicians, but their performance lacked tension in the suspension-rich slow movements, derived from Corelli, and drive in the faster movements, derived from the ballet music tradition typical of a composer like Lully.

I think I’m right in saying that performances of Baroque music on modern instruments are now surprisingly uncommon: at least they are in my experience. This concert, with multiple players per part on modern instruments, was certainly an exercise in expectation adjustment and, while I am prepared to concede that perhaps not much is lost in the translation to modern instruments and scale of forces in works such as the overture to Jephthaor Bach’s symphony, the Praetorius dances seemed much closer to Respighi in the scoring they were accorded and a work like the Muffat doeslose something when turned into a modern ‘orchestral’ work. The playing in this concert was always precise and disciplined and the engagement with the music almost unflaggingly sincere and well thought out. But the best results really came when the native scale of the music was better respected — in the Schmelzer ballettoin particular, reduced to a handful of players and in which individual contributions, the playing with and of polyphonic lines, and the sheer joy of the piece, could be heard in appropriate clarity.

Reviewer John Weretka heard Howard Penny in concert with ANAM Musicians at South Melbourne Town Hall on May 18

How refreshing to go to a concert of Christmas music, even if we are only in Advent ( on Sunday 3 December) that, unlike the slew of Messiah performances at the moment, actually bears more than a tangential relationship to the season! The Australian Chamber Orchestra, augmented with brass and wind, accompanied the Choir of London at Hamer Hall in a performance of Bach’s monumental Christmas Oratorio (actually the sequence of cantatas for a sequence of important days in the Christmas season rather than a completely unified oratorio), reviving a collaboration of 2013.

Richard Tognetti mostly laid aside his violin — he played, somewhat distractingly, in just two items, one of the them the sinfonia to the second cantata, where his contribution was really unnecessary — to conduct the massed ensemble. Tognetti’s conducting style is economical to the point of being spare but doesn’t lack for effectiveness: a small gesture seemed to be enough to conjure an accent here, a swell there. Tight discipline was certainly the order of day, with only one or two moments of miscommunication in about three and a half hours’ music. Tognetti’s reading of score was pretty much by the numbers. Just one movement, Ehre sei Gott in the second cantata, seemed unnecessarily quick, but Tognetti is in good company here, as most readings of this movement add speed to what is already an almost over-busy texture. Driven as it might have been, none of the precision was lost, and Tognetti revealed again and again, as he has in other moments at the podium, an unerring ability to discover the hidden moments in an orchestration, moments that most other conductors seem to let slide, whether it be punctuating wind chords in a movement like Ehre sei Gott, or precise calculation of the length of the wind chordal accompaniment in the recitative So geht denn hin, or giving special emphasis to the twining suspensions of the horn parts in Fallt mit Danken. The orchestra were the real heroes of this concert, with every gesture in its place and an unfailing attention to details great and small. Special praise should go to the entire wind department, with a unity of sound, tuning and outlook one rarely hears in early wind playing; among them, the two principal oboes, Xenia Löffler and Michael Bosch, both on loan of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, provided probably the best playing of the afternoon, ably supported in key moments by Adam Masters and Markus Müller (oboes da caccia) and Jane Gower (bassoon). This playing reminded me of what an interesting thinker Bach was about double-reed sound, especially in movements where the orchestra is largely or only of double reeds.

The Choir of London’s biography in the programme oddly said very little about its performance philosophy or history, playing up instead its admirable commitment to social justice issues, particularly in bringing music to the Palestinian community of the Middle East. Normally that wouldn’t matter, but it did in this performance because all of the solo material, including the arduous role of the Evangelist, was taken by people within the choir. Given his role as the Evangelist, Nicholas Mulroy’s biography reveals a professionally trained singer with a good number of public appearances behind him; two other names I recognised among the ranks of the singers, Lotte Betts-Dean and Fiona Campbell, are Australian singers, also highly experienced and well trained. The rest of the soloists were a rather mixed bunch, often lacking the volume to cut above the orchestral sound (there were several moments where a singer was just lost in that sound) or the range to deal with music (two of bass soloists in particular suffered from this problem).

There were three major exceptions to this, all of whom gave quite enviable and mature performances of the music assigned to them: alto Lotte Betts-Dean, immensely characteristic and clearly engaged in the text of movements such as Warum wollt ihr erschrekken, although she had too little to sing as a soloist; soprano Mary Bevan, the sheer level of whose vocal maturity was a pleasure in her one major contribution, Nur ein Wink von seinen Händen; and Jeremy Budd, who gave perhaps the finest rendition I have ever heard, live or recorded, of the fiendishly difficult Frohe Hirten. This aria alone was worth the price of admission. Nicholas Mulroy, who must have been exhausted at the end of the work, never flagged in his double role as Evangelist and chorister. With a voice somewhat similar to that of the late Philip Langridge, he displayed that singer’s attention to the detail of the text in his recitative material.

It’s a pity that the solo material was so unevenly sung, given that as an ensemble, the Choir of London put on display their long association with this work in vibrant and engaged performance. If opportunities for quieter singing were few (Ich steh an deiner Krippe hier was a great moment of more intense and introspective performance), their readings of the bigger numbers, often the opening or closing numbers of cantatas — Jauchzet, frohlocket, Herrscher des Himmels, Herr wenn die stolzen Feinde schauben, Nun seid ihr wohl gerocken or, most importantly, Ehre sei dir Gott — were buoyant, exuberant and rhythmically incisive without resorting to egregious choralisms like over-pronounced dental consonants. No less impressive was the singing of the often-overlooked chorales, motivated by close attention to text and prosody and great musical flexibility.

Polyphonic Voices’ August 26 concert at Sacred Heart Church in Carlton was a magnificent way to survey the achievements made by French composers in the roughly a century between 1909 (the date of the publication of Debussy’s Trois chansons) and Yves Castagnet’s Messe Salve Regina (complete in its current form by 2007).

For me, the strongest music and the strongest performances in the first half of the programme were represented by the readings Polyphonic Voices gave Debussy’s Trois chansons: luminescent and supple in Dieu! Qu’il la fait bon regarder, sprightly and rhythmical in Quant j’ai ouy la tabourin and attentive to the chiding tone of Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain. The Trois chansons set up an overriding concern of the choir’s engagement with all of these works: a deep dedication to textual audibility, undergirded by fine diction especially in those works (such as Ravel’s Nicolette and Ronde) where the text is structured as a dialogue or is set in a rapid parlando style.

I wished for a slightly shorter selection of the Poulenc Chansons françaises. A composer whose idiom wears thin after a while wore thinner in a series of largely strophic songs, even if Polyphonic Voices remained engaged with the text and mood of the individual songs, highlights coming in Margoton va t’a l’eau, Clic, clac, dansez sabots and C’est la petit’ fill’ du prince.

The concert’s second half opened with visiting organist, Thomas Gaynor, giving a masterly and colourful reading of Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain — rarely have I heard the organ of Sacred Heart used to such impressive effect, and Gaynor is clearly a formidable organist who should continue to draw our attention.

The major work in the second half focussed around movements of the Messe Salve Regina by contemporary French composer, Yves Castagnet (Castagnet has provided music for all the movements except the Credo). Based on the Gregorian tune Salve Regina, Castagnet has cultivated a musical style in this work that, while evidently in touch with the music of Messiaen and Duruflé, also steered clear of direct citation or pastiche to create a complex that remained perpetually interesting over the span of the setting. The setting, for choir and two organs (a grande orgue and a choir organ), provided ample opportunity both for Gaynor to display his formidable artistry (the grande orgue part in particular is obviously written by someone eager to explore the instrument’s capabilities) and for the choir to produce massive amounts of sound.

At only around 20 singers, Polyphonic Voices can indeed produce a massive amount of sound; if at times that volume verged on being overwhelming, at its best it was also pretty thrilling. Greater attention was needed at times to the precise balance between soloists and the choir — the former sometimes overwhelmed by the latter even if really fine voices, such as those of Dan Walker and Christian Smith, can more than hold their own.

Polyphonic Voices is now into its fourth year and, I regret to say, this is the first time I have heard them. They invite comparison with Gloriana, which has also used the excellent acoustics of Sacred Heart for its concerts, in terms both of repertoire and scale. It would be hard (and invidious) to draw any neat distinctions between the two: if Polyphonic Voices is slightly more disciplined and dedicated to sheen of sound, the sheer raw commitment that Gloriana’s singers conjure in large-scale works is also pretty impressive. The repertoire is certainly big enough to accommodate two choirs’ advocacy of it and, fortunately for us, so is Melbourne.

— John Weretka reviewed Salut Paris! at Sacred Heart, Carlton on August 26, 2017.
Polyphonic Voices were joined by Thomas Gaynor, Tony Way and Michael Fulcher

Opera Australia really has broken new territory in this recent production, mounting the first opera in Polish the company has ever performed. They could scarcely have chosen a better work than Syzmanowski’s Król Roger, which the composer conceived in the light of travel in the Mediterranean and developed with the co-operation of his cousin and co-librettist Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Work began on the opera in 1918 and concluded in 1924, with the premiere given in 1926.

Syzmanowski’s opera — the composer preferred to call it a “mysterium” — is certainly a strange but beguiling beast. Divided into three brief acts, it lasts a mere hour and a half. If a first glance gives the impression that this is one of those operas, particularly common at the turn of the twentienth century, in which nothing happens, a second glance confirms that this is a work of deep and rich symbolism, gifted with an exceptional libretto, depicting the inner psychological struggle of a man. That struggle, given Szymanowski’s equivocal ending, can be read on multiple levels — is this an essay on the perennial battle between the Apollonian and Dionysiac, the subject of Britten’s Death in Venice, or the image of a man fallen prey to demagoguery, a story for our times, or a condemnation of the moral strictures of Christianity and the advocacy of an “oriental” sensuality? Syzmanowski’s music, the unlikely child of Chopin and Skryabin, seems the perfect accompaniment to this deeply ambiguous story, filled with odd instrumental conjunctions and turns of harmony; even when Szymanowski is doing something ‘normal’, as in the pseudo-Byzantine chant that opens the opera, the effect is destablising, as though we were seeing something familiar in a distorting mirror.

Kasper Holten’s directorial conception of this work is little short of a miracle. A gigantic and menacing yet enigmatic man’s head dominates the stage in the first act, pointing up that this is a drama of the mind, and the chorus, whipped up by the Archbishop and the Deaconness, cries out both its condemnation of, and support for, the Shepherd from boxes in a stadium, a cross between a Greek chorus and the mob in a Roman amphitheatre. In the second act, the head swivels to reveal Roger singing to us from within his own thoughts while seething dancers pulsate and pant, emblems of his thought and the suppression of his desire. Later, they boil up through the head, casting books down onto the stage in a rejection of the rational. The third act takes place in a ruined theatre, illuminated by a burning pile of books around which Roger’s subjects dance in a self-forgetting orgy. The opera closes with a blaze of light, reminiscent of that accompanying the opening of the Fifth Door in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, the gateway to self-annihilating horrors.

An opera so heavily concentrated in the world of ideas could so easily become a bloodless, esoteric and undramatic affair, close to the world of the allegorical oratorio of the early seventeenth century. Fortunately, graced with a fine complement of singers, there was no chance of that here.

The opera is effectively a battle of wills between King Roger, played by Michael Honeyman and the Shepherd, played by Arthur Espiritu. The Shepherd is something of a cypher, changing little through the course of the drama, and Espirtu lets the character speak for himself without larding the role up in any way. The senusousness of the music itself is the means of the Shepherd’s seduction of Roger, quite apart the content of what he says, a classic case of the method and not the message. Only the Shepherd’s changing costume gives the audience any sense of how dangerous this figure is.

Roger’s is a stronger character — in a sense, the only really strong character in the opera — and Michael Honeyman is fully invested in it, tracing the full character arc from the stern but fair-minded champion of orthodoxy in the first act, through the torment of the second act (brilliantly realised in Holten’s deployment of dancers) and the desolation and resignation of the final act. The role is evidently highly taxing, but Honeyman scarcely flags. Indeed, he hardly can, as Szymanowski reserves his great moment, Roger’s hymn to the sun, until the very end of the opera. A fine performance in every way.

Lorina Gore’s Roxana is really the “third wheel” in the opera, with neither Szymanowski nor Iwaszkiewicz evidently committed to fleshing her out in any particular way, notwithstanding Roger’s supposed devotion to her and the important role she seems to play in the political and confessional machinations that lie behind the condemnation and ultimate acceptance of the Shepherd’s message. Gore is certainly committed to the slight material with which she has to work in a performance with only very few flaws. Particularly impressive was her wordless hymn of devotion to the Shepherd in the second act as she forcefully conveyed the sublimation of her own will to that of the Shepherd.

Of the minor roles, the most impressive was that of the Deaconness, played by Dominica Matthews, a real study of a hateful demagogue. Her partner in crime is not her ecclesiastical superior, the Archbishop (played by Gennadi Dubinsky) but actually the chorus, who collectively navigate superbly the journey from the Shepherd’s condemners to his supporters.

It’s pretty rarely the case that opera productions, whether domestic or foreign, get everything right. King Roger was one of those that did, and is a real testament to what riches there are in some of the stranger byways of operatic history.

John Weretka reviewed Opera Australia’s production of King Roger (or Król Roger) on May 19, 2017.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s exploration of the symphonies of Mahler, under the assured direction of Sir Andrew Davis, continued recently with a performance of the seventh symphony filled out with a revision of Paul Stanhope’s work The heavens declare, originally written in 1999.

Stanhope’s is a lavishly scored work, putting Mahler’s uncharacteristically modestly scored seventh symphony to shame in the brilliance of its orchestration. The composer calls The heavens declare a choral symphony but, notwithstanding its orchestration, its length marks it more as choral ode akin to Gustav Holst’s Hymn of Jesus. Indeed, several sections of this work seemed surprisingly close to the Holst work of 1917, particularly in the two psalm-setting portions of the composition, which seemed to draw inspiration from the kind of mood that Holst establishes in the “Divine grace is dancing” section of his Hymn.

Stanhope’s composition lacks something of the tautness and transparency of structure of the Holst work, but he compensates for this with a livelier sense of orchestration than Holst ever really had. He clearly has an exciting imagination when it comes to orchestration, with especially good and atmospheric use of the percussion section, even if there are occasional reminiscences of Orff in his use of it. Stanhope was on weaker ground with the choral parts, sung with admirable diction as they were by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus. Orchestra and chorus gave a committed performance of the work, but my impression of the work was less one of a narrative whole (a real strength of Holst’s Hymn, which is tightly woven around a series of important musical themes and a unity of textual mood) than of a series of often highly detailed and engaging moments.

The Orchestra seems to show unflagging interest and energy when it comes to the Mahler symphonies, tackling what is, in some ways, a problematic symphony in the seventh. The Fifth and Sixth had been gargantuan works, both with respect to orchestration and scope of vision — the Sixth almost kills itself with those hammer blows. The Seventh reads as a more modest work, composed of short scenes rather than the epic breadth of the previous two symphonies. It was hard to find fault with this performance but, if anything, for me the outer movements (the Allegro risoluto and the Rondo) lacked just a little of the motoric drive they require, given Mahler’s unusually undifferentiated approach to orchestration in them. Nonetheless, the first movement in particular was marked by some pretty heroic brass (especially from the horns) and wind playing, essential given the burden of thematic development they carry. The centre of the symphony is a three-part structure, with two Nachtmusik movements flanking a shorter, diabolic scherzo.

The best of these sections, and to my mind the finest passage in the symphony as a whole, was the second Nachtmusik, so like the third movement of the Sixth Symphony. Mahler’s orchestration finds its fullest flower here, with parts for mandolin and guitar, and the Orchestra’s performance reminded me of the way in which Mahler points so strongly to Webern and the other composers in the Second Viennese School in favouring the light, transitory touches this movement is made from. It is a testament to the Orchestra’s maturity that this kind of movement holds no fear for them. On to the Eighth…?

Melbourne hasn’t exactly been starved of opportunities to hear Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, with performances by Newman College and Concerto Italiano in recent years. It was Ensemble Gombert’s duty to present something new in what has become a well-furrowed field, and they did this admirably by presenting the very rarely heard organ-only version of the Vespers in their recent Local Heroes concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

In one sense, one loses very little by hearing the Vespers in this configuration: most of the vocal music remains and was only ever intended to be accompanied by a continuo department, even if modern performances often lard this up by doubling voices with instruments. At another level, something pretty critical is lost, namely the lavish and virtuosic instrumentation with which listeners to the work have become familiar. But an unexpected gain is the six-part Magnificat, as Monteverdi more than makes up for the restriction in his palette with a setting that is remarkably different from the version most of us know.

Monteverdi’s intention in the Vespers seems to have been to show potential employers the full command he had both of conservative stile antico writing and the more progressive, Luzzaschi-derived moderno ‘recitative’ style that was very much in fashion in the courts and chambers of early seventeenth-century Italy. Monteverdi proved to be remarkably fluent in what was a very modern idiom at the time he wrote the Vespers, and it is probably the instances of that virtuosic style that draws most audiences to the Vespers. The stile moderno is eminently a soloist’s style and, as a result, it is critical that singers with the capacity to realise not just technical difficulties, but also the affective and rhetorical difficulties, form the quintet of soloists (two sopranos, two tenors and one bass) that constitute the core of the soloist group. The casting of the tenors in particular is critical, with two lengthy monodies (Nigra sum and Audi caelum) and two parts of a trio (Duo seraphim) forming the bulk of the virtuosic demands made on the singers.

The strongest of the soloists was Michael Strasser (bass) whose part, although important, occupies just a fraction of the soloists’ time. Strasser’s singing was confident, well produced, focussed, and characteristic — a line really worth listening to, even if at the bottom of the texture. Sopranos Carol Veldhoven and Katherine Lieschke did a creditable job with Pulchra es, but the fact that their voices point in quite different directions undermined the sinuous interweaving and interlocking that is supposed to characterise this movement. Lieschke was on finer form in her solo in the Magnificat.

The finest singers in the line-up for a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers need to be the two tenor soloists; Ensemble Gombert’s choice fell on two choristers, Vaughan McAlley and Tim van Nooten, the latter of whom took the two longer “concertos”, Nigra sum and Audi caelum. Both tenors largely got around the notes (itself a formidable challenge, and not one to be dismissed lightly), but neither gave the sense of the nonchalant ease Italians of the period called sprezzatura, nor of passionate commitment to sound or text. Duo seraphim, a conceptualisation in sound of what it would be like for two angels to call to each other across the vault of heaven, lacked a sense of ecstatic engagement.

Part of the difficulty the singers in general experienced with this music must be put down to the decision to perform at what seems to have been the high Italian pitch that was apparently common in Monteverdi’s day. In a work already notated in a punishing tessitura (the tenor soloists are largely singing in the top fourth of their voices), to take the music even higher in pitch served no one. The voices were cruelly pushed in ways that were unnecessary to the music. John O’Donnell’s direction was largely economical and commonsensical, but he was unwilling just to let moments of rhetoric sit — Duo seraphim’s transitions from three parts to one in the second part of the concerto was a moment in case, where the seam was just pasted over: one got no sense of how remarkable the Christian claim for the triune nature of God was. The magic of Monteverdi as a reader of texts resides in moments like these, and they should be played for all they are worth.

Ensemble Gombert may be many things, but it is not a choir of soloists. The strongest performances in the concert actually came from the massed body of the choir in the two psalms without soloists. Nisi Dominus was lucid, rhythmically incisive (tricky, given the density of the texture and the slow movement of the harmonies) and mobile. The Ensemble sang Lauda Jerusalem in a lower transposition, providing welcome relief for all, and it was a thrilling and engaged performance even at the lower pitch. Both of these psalms provide moments of contrast of mood at the doxology and I would have preferred a stronger change of gear to register this — a change of dynamic or a different vocal colour. But both see Monteverdi in the stile antico and, not coincidentally, the Ensemble on home territory, giving performances indicative of the Ensemble at its best.

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John Weretka reviewed Ensemble Gombert’s performance of Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 (Organ version), directed by John O’Donnell, at the Melbourne Recital Centre on  February 13, 2017.