Pinchgut Opera | Eternal Light
August 24, 2024, City Recital Centre, Sydney, NSW
Allegri, Schmelzer and Biber with Cantillation and Orchestra of the Antipodes conducted by Erin Helyard.
How can one piece of music endure in our human hearts for nearly 400 years? The famous Allegri Miserere has – you know the one with the haunting and ethereal top ‘C’ that’s appeared in Adidas adverts and is famously sung by Kings College Cambridge?
Pinchgut Opera presented this piece as the star of its program Eternal Light at the City Recital Hall, performed to Pinchgut perfection. It began with a full version of the piece from 1661, transcribed by Australian tenor Jacob Lawrence, travelled through Schmelzer, Pachelbel and von Biber, and landed with the famous version compiled from Robert Haas in 1932 and Sir Ivor Atkins in 1951.
Erin Helyard says in the program notes that the famous Miserere is only ‘attributed’ to Allegri, and that the earliest surviving source of it dates to 1661, nine years after Allegri’s death. Did he write it? What happened to the three secret authorised copies of the piece? Did Mozart secretly transcribe and steal it from the Vatican 100 years later? Or was his dad just embellishing?
Whether or not your musical interests are intertwined with historical detective work, you could not fail to be moved by this exquisite journey back in time, to the intensely spiritual music performed exclusively in Rome’s sacred Sistine Chapel for Holy Week, including for the Roman Emperor Leopold.
We became his ears as we bathed in a seamless concert, with no applause between each piece. Momentarily we were the royal audience from the early Enlightenment, privileged to hear and experience sacred music written for select ears, including Pope Urban VIII. This patronage of Leopold’s also inspired Helyard to include work by Biber and Schmelzer in tracing the history of the Miserere.
What does it mean in the 21st Century to listen to this music? How does it still connect to us now in our busy screen-scrolling existence?
With Helyard conducting and playing from the chamber organ, the concert was sonorous, sombre, reverent. One hesitates to use words like Zen, as it’s out of context, but certainly intense meditation comes with this music performed by Australia’s leading experts in its genre. There’s a cleansing and a deep peace in its depth, fulfilling its purpose, as Schmelzer wrote in 1662, to ‘refresh the human spirit.’
It’s always inspiring to be transported musically into the past with The Orchestra of the Antipodes playing live, including sackbuts (early trombones) coming to the fore and the beautiful theorbo taking centre stage.
Cantillation’s soloists and chorus alternated, sometimes four sometimes five, sometimes nine, and for the final piece split into the two top levels of the recital hall, magically transformed into a chapel-like setting by Lighting Designer Veronique Bennet. The singer’s ghostly faces emerged through a red haze and then disappeared as they filed in and out of the top floors, monk-like.
We moved from picking out the incredible talent of the soloists, Lana Kains, Bonnie de la Hunty, Olivia Payne, Louis Hurley and Andrew O’Connor, and the chorus of Ariana Ricci, William Varga, Liam Green and Gabriel Desiderio, to hearing them as a blended whole. Two singers, Hurley and Payne, were supported by the Taryn Fiebig Scholar program, a professional development program established by Pinchgut Opera in honour of the late soprano Taryn Fiebig.
Punctuating the program was the interjection of Schmelzer’s Sonata no 4 and Sonata No 7, before we dived deep into the stillness and complexity of the complete work of Biber’s Requiem in F minor, including the exquisite Gloria and Hosanna.
Finally, we were swept up by the ecstatic top ‘C’ by Lana Kains from the famed Miserere excerpt, a melody typically reserved for a boy soprano, before the music gently guided us back to reality – the blinking early Spring sunlight of George Street’s shopping mall.
Photo Credit: Anna Kucera
