Christmas to Candelmas - December 15, 2007

Clive O'Connnell, The Age, December 18, 2007

Stately sounds of Venice

VENETIAN Renaissance and Baroque composers produced an instantly recognisable church music: stately and aurally impressive, assured in utterance. We have a vivid idea of the affluence of this city from a notable group of composers, the top four featuring in the year's final concert from John O'Donnell's Ensemble Gombert.

Escorted by a string trio - two violins and a bass viol - as well as a cornett-and-sackbut quartet, this accomplished body divided itself into antiphonal choirs of seven or eight lines, even splitting into 14 parts with instrumental help for a lavish Nunc dimittis setting.

This program stayed rooted in Venice, with music by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli, two richly resonant motets from Giovanni Bassano, and three Monteverdi products, the concert ending with his Magnificat in a restored version by O'Donnell, who punctuated the night's vocal/instrumental action with short Intonations, ornate introductions that gave the St Marks singers their note.

Soprano Carol Veldhoven, tenor Peter Campbell and bass Tim Daly worked through some ornate solo lines with unflustered security. But the highlights were the huge blocks of sounds for intersecting forces that glorified God (and the Venetian state) with inspired jubilation.

Anna McAlister, The Herald Sun, December 18, 2007

CHRISTMAS, Epiphany and Candlemas were the focus of Ensemble Gombert's concert. They sang Venetian motets of the Renaissance and Baroque periods -- staple repertoire at the basilica of San Marco -- accompanied by an ensemble of early string and brass instruments.

Introducing many of the motets were brief organ ``intonaziones'' performed by director John O'Donnell, who also led many of the works from a small organ at the front of the ensemble.

Much of the voicing and instrumentation in this music is the performers' choice: the different lines can be divided in a variety of ways among the singers and instruments. The musicians, therefore, realised O'Donnell's arrangements.

Gombert sang with their usual clean, perfectly blended timbre. The sopranos, as always, were outstanding. Their stratospheric lines in Giovanni Gabrieli's Nunc dimittis were clear and in tune with the volume delightfully restrained.

Some of the male-voice ensembles seemed less controlled, especially in Monteverdi's Magnificat. Its solos and ensembles demand considerable agility and were not quite as polished as Gombert's norm.

Xavier College chapel has an excellent acoustic for Gombert a cappella, but it proved less successful for some combinations of voices and instruments.

The players balanced and blended sensitively but the thicker-textured works, such as the Hodie Christus natus est settings of Bassano and Andrea Gabrieli, lacked Gombert's usual sparkling clarity. Monteverdi's sparser Christe, Redemptor omnium and Magnificat settings fared better.

German Baroque a capella - September 8, 2007

Clive O'Connnell, The Age, September 11, 2007

... On Saturday night, the Ensemble Gombert began easily, moving through congenial Baroque choral music before finishing with three a cappella challenges from J. S Bach ...

At the Gombert event, the first part ran twice as long as the following Bach motets sequence, the prefatory material coming from Orlando di Lasso, whose In te Domine speravi served as a springboard for the following Magnificat by Praetorius.

This pairing yielded the night's most honeyed singing, rich chords and full-spectrum harmonies flattering the choir, which was put to slightly sterner work in four pieces by Schutz, where the development of material becomes more organised and dense.

But the Bach works displayed the Gomberts' dynamic powers, the opening Furchte dich nicht erupting onto the scene with heightened effect and urgency after the sombre steadiness of the preceding program items.

The newly attributed Ich lasse dich nicht operates in a smaller field but gave clear definition to the differences in texture between the double choirs, while the final Komm, Jesu, komm emphasised the linear complexity and strength of the composer's vocal writing.

Every choir finds Bach's more tangled contrapuntal segments difficult to articulate with absolute ease, but this group of experts gives as close to an ideal realisation of the composer's hefty vocal concertato sequences as we are likely to hear in this country. ...

Taverner to Tavener - August 4, 2007

Ann McAlister, The Herald Sun, August 8, 2007

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.

Clive O'Connnell, The Age, August 7, 2007

... 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.