Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg choir
Wait three minutes and you’ll get it. It was recomposed into a landmark fantasy
by Vaughn Williams 340 years later.
Paul got it right with this program. He got it right with Max Reibl, particularly when he was paired with Timothy Chung and he got it right – as usual – with the orchestra and chorus.
Paul Dyer, conductor
Max Reibl, counter tenor
Melbourne Recital Centre
7:00pm Saturday 24 February 2018
And ABC Classic FM Weekend Afternoons (from Angel Place)
Saturday 10 March 2018
A few of us ganged up to buy Chris and Ian an Oz-Brandenburg
subscription as a wedding present. Great idea: they renewed it for 2018 in the
same row as us – up near pensioner class. “Thomas Tallis’ England” on a warm
Summer evening was superb on so many fronts – the ideal (extended) wedding
present for them.
Someone with an excellent working knowledge of music history
(Mr Dyer et al) had drawn on their
research to find well/not-well known music from composers who had worked
together, succeeded each other, inspired each other and who had, very
importantly for a composing career, managed to survive a potentially fatal devotion
to the wrong religious brand.
The concert was a programming masterpiece. Every piece
earned its place in its own right. And there was a couple of little private bonuses
that every programmer has the right to enjoy.
Bonus 1: Here’s the question: Purcell’s Rondeau from Abdelazar, how do I know it? But there’s
no answer unless you read the program note to its end. (It was used 250 years
later by another brilliant Englishman in his Young Person’s Guide …).
Bonus 2: Tallis’s Third tune (Psalm 2) of 9 Psalm tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter was played without comment. Here’s the question: I know that theme, but where, how?”.
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| Thomas Tallis wrti.org |
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| Ralph Vaughan Williams wrti.org |
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| Listen for the viola part |
Paul got it right with this program. He got it right with Max Reibl, particularly when he was paired with Timothy Chung and he got it right – as usual – with the orchestra and chorus.
The Brandenburgs – vocal and instrumental – have extremely
high order musicianship. That’s by no means universal in Australian orchestras
so it makes this gang stand out. But, most importantly they have a very rare
precision. It’s not the mechanical, cut glass precision that many German-style
orchestras have. It’s an organic variety that is precise but warm. We are
enticed into the piece with the musicians to enjoy it’s warmth and joy. Reibl
fell into that style too and the bonus he gave us was his acting. He brought “Cold
Song” from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur
to life with that most difficult of all acting techniques, ‘doing nothing’.
I can scarcely move or draw my breath,
Let me, let me freeze to death.
Simply wonderful, superb, unpretentious, gut-grabbing!
Dyer has a secret weapon; the like him! They have complete
confidence in him (and him, them) and they trust him.
Word has got around. MRC was sold out – twice. Thomas Tallis’ England was a
ten-out-of-ten concert.
I went hunting for a seat for the Sunday arvo repeat; I found
two; I bought neither. The 5:30pm start would have made me very late for dinner
with my ginger grandbrats; something that was always going to have higher
production values than a Dyer job – even if he did have Australia’s best
baroque musicians to work with.
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