Gloria

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VIOLIN
Laurence Jackson
Concertmaster
Riley Skevington
Assoc Concertmaster
Semra Lee
Assistant Concertmaster
• MACA
Alexandra Isted
Principal 1st Violin
Zak Rowntree*
Principal 2nd Violin
Kylie Liang
Assoc Principal 2nd Violin
Beth Hebert
Emma Hunt
• Ulrich & Gloria Kunzmann
William Huxtable
Lucas O’Brien

VIOLA
Alex Brogan
Benjamin Caddy
• Future Logic
Elliot O'Brien
Helen Tuckey

CELLO
Isaac Davis
Shigeru Komatsu
• Unnamed donors
Oliver McAslan
• M & D Forrest, and
Michelle Todd
Tim South

DOUBLE BASS
John Keene
• Janet Holmes à Court
AC & Gilbert George
Giovanni Vinci

OBOE
Sarah Young

TRUMPET
Jenna Smith
Acting Principal
• John & Nita Walshe

ORGAN/CONTINUO
Stewart Smith^

In the traditional vigil service for Easter Eve, there’s a moment when the sanctuary erupts with the sound of bells and all kinds of joyful noise. Having begun in sombre darkness, the church is now filled with music and light as Christians rejoice in the risen life of their Saviour – ‘Glory to God in the highest!’

Tonight’s Easter concert hints at that moment of transition and celebration, setting the scene with a Tudor lament, ‘When David Heard’ by Thomas Weelkes, before jumping forward a century to two brilliant sacred choral works: the betterknown of Vivaldi’s Gloria settings, and Handel’s youthful masterpiece, his Dixit Dominus.

The almost hedonistic joy of tonight’s Baroque works for choir and orchestra is amplified by the context of the subdued introduction, which also reminds us that in the church season of Lent now ending, instruments have taken a back seat – church bells have been silent, the organ used minimally. And so we begin our concert with an a cappella work: the choir singing alone, its voices divided into a six-part texture that floats and weaves, filling the space with music of exquisite anguish.

‘When David Heard’ takes its text from the Bible but it isn’t liturgical music intended for worship. It’s best described as a sacred madrigal – the subject matter biblical, the style drawing on Italian Renaissance traditions of word painting and vocal writing.

Thomas Weelkes (1576–1623) had begun his career composing madrigals – a young English composer stimulated by this newly imported vocal genre and finding his extraordinary musical imagination perfectly suited to its highly charged poetic texts and expressive dramas in miniature. He published his first book of madrigals in 1597 at the age of 21, followed by two more, in 1598 and 1600. But by 1602, he’d moved to Chichester Cathedral, turning his focus to sacred music – a choice that would result in a prolific output of Anglican services and verse anthems.

‘When David Heard’ sits on the cusp of those two worlds. Its succinct account of King David’s grief at the death of his son points to Old Testament traditions of public mourning, but the words are deeply personal and Weelkes’s dramatisation creates an intimate picture of grief that would seem out of place in worship.

When David heard that Absalom was slain
He went up into his chamber over the gate
and wept, and thus he said,
O my son Absalom my son,
would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son!
2 Samuel 18:33

The result – barely five minutes long – is a microcosm of loss and lamentation. The expressive gestures would have seemed progressive to Weelkes’s contemporaries and they remain striking to the modern ear. The use of silence, for example, and disjointed, fragmentary phrases evoke the broken-voiced king keening from his chamber. Contrasts between richly weaving vocal lines and thin textures create a disturbing bleakness. Then, as the music draws to a close, the yearningly dissonant phrases shift in colour to suggest a mood of resignation.

Despite more than 40 years of balancing scholarship, modern accounts of Weelkes’s life tend to focus on a few salacious reports of tardiness, absenteeism and drunkenness at work, painting a picture of a man in decline. In 1616, for instance, he was reported to the Bishop as a ‘notorious swearer & blasphemer’, and temporarily dismissed for being drunk at the organ and using bad language during divine service. And yet he was reinstated – evidently a valued musician considered ‘exquisite in his profession’ and (high praise) able to cause the Chichester Cathedral organ ‘to seeme much the better’ than it actually was. The truth, as is often the case, was likely complicated, influenced in part by anachronistic working conditions at Chichester, which attempted to impose monastic rigour within an essentially secular establishment. As the vicar-choral John Lilliatt reported, there were no common drunkards in the choir, but ‘pipes often used, must sometimes be moystned’.

Following this moving prelude, we enter a place of worship (so to speak) for the proclamation of the ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ – Glory be to God on high! This hymn of praise isn’t sung during Lent, so when it returns on Easter Eve, the effect of voices and instruments resounding together in jubilation is all the more striking. And there’s no musical setting more joyous and splendid than the Gloria in D major (RV 589) by Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741).

This Gloria is the ‘Four Seasons’ of Vivaldi’s church music, the most famous of the sacred works he composed as music master for the Ospedale della Pietà, where orphans and illegitimate daughters of the Venetian nobility were given an education and trained to sing and play instruments, in preparation for a respectable marriage or a career on the stage.

As the leading orphanage-conservatory in 18th-century Venice, the Pietà was a tourist attraction; its chapel performances (for this is what they were) drew audiences from all over Europe and Britain. Contemporary reports reveal the virtuosity at Vivaldi’s disposal: from the young women who could ‘sing like angels’ (in some cases low enough to take on tenor and bass parts) to those for whom no instrument was ‘large enough to frighten them’. And the brilliant and expressive music he wrote for them has a cosmopolitan appeal. Vivaldi-composer of- operas is evident in the up-to-date character of the music for the soloists; the orchestral writing reveals the hand of Vivaldi-composer-of-concertos; meanwhile, his use of the chorus provides grandeur and a little old-fashioned solemnity.

Signature gestures emerge from the outset, with all the instruments playing a buoyant theme that combines leaps of the octave and repeated notes: simple musical ingredients used to great effect. That thrilling opening is instantly recognisable, but the heart of the Gloria, and its most exquisite music, is found in ‘Et in terra pax hominibus’ – a prayer for peace on earth. Here the vocal lines unfold in long phrases over pulsing strings; despite the words, Vivaldi’s music is suffused with profound sadness. It may be a prayer for peace, but peace is not a foregone conclusion. This movement is later balanced by the alto soloist’s equally profound plea for mercy in ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’.

But the overall impression of Gloria is one of vitality. This comes not only from music such as ‘Laudamus te’, an effervescent duet, but from the way Vivaldi exploits the dramatic power of contrast – each movement provides an emotional foil for the next. Severe simplicity (‘Gratius agimus tibi’) heightens the magnificence of a choral fugue (‘Propter magnam gloriam’). A radiant lilting dialogue between soprano and oboe (‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’) highlights the grandly assertive skipping rhythms of what Vivaldi called his French style (‘Domine fili unigenite’). The full ensemble sounds all the more brilliant alongside reflective moments of extreme intimacy.

A Gloria is a hymn of praise and prayer – a declaration of faith. By contrast, Psalm 110 (Vulgate 109) is a fierce text, shot through with violence: enemies are trod underfoot, kings are shattered, skulls smashed. And so Handel – as much a man of the theatre as Vivaldi – begins his setting in media res, plunging us into the thick of things with cascades of notes from the violins. The voices when they enter make much of the opening word (‘Dixit, dixit’), savouring the plosive qualities of the consonants. The tone is set for Handel’s most ambitious and dramatic sacred work, all the more astonishing for being the work of a 22 year old.

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was a cosmopolitan composer who assimilated the German, Italian and French styles in a distinctive anglicised blend. He’s best-known for his English oratorios and ceremonial instrumental music, as well as his operas, which revitalised the 18th-century London stage. But the Handel in this concert is still finding his voice.

As a young man, Handel spent four years in Italy – a crucial period in which he absorbed the best of the Italian style. At the same time, this staunch Protestant adopted a ‘when in Rome’ attitude, writing music for the Roman Catholic rites, including the Dixit Dominus.

If the Dixit Dominus reminds you of Vivaldi, this shouldn’t surprise. It was begun in Venice towards the end of 1706 – probably intended for one of the Venetian ospedali. It uses strategies from the Venetian concerto grosso: contrasting a group of five vocal soloists with the full ensemble, and adopting of the recurring themes of ritornello (‘little return’) structure. And it is virtuoso music, making extreme demands on the performers. The first soprano line, for example, lies very high in the range, and the writing for the voices is often instrumental in character.

By Easter 1707, Handel had moved to Rome and completed the Dixit Dominus, and it was almost certainly performed in one of the Easter Vesper services that year, as well as in the spectacular Carmelite Vespers in July. In a nod to both Italian practice and the liturgical context of the psalm, Handel quotes a Gregorian chant, but he adds a German touch by using the chant as a cantus firmus, and so we hear it in sustained notes from the sopranos in the first movement (‘donec ponam…’, about 2 minutes in). In the final movement, he reprises a fragment of the chant in the lower voices on the words ‘sicut erat in principio’ (as it was in the beginning) in a nifty musical pun.

Throughout the music, Handel pays close attention to the words. In the opening, for example, he assigns the chorus to indirect speech (‘The Lord said unto my Lord’), while the solo entries mark direct speech (‘Sit thou at my right hand…’). And in the word-painting tradition of Weelkes, he finds vivid musical imagery to match emotion-laden words. The chorus ‘Judicabit in nationibus’ offers a striking example on the phrase ‘conquassabit capita’. As heads are crushed and skulls smashed, the chorus hurls repeated notes at us, culminating in a savage ‘con – quas – sa – bit!’ At the same time, the Dixit Dominus foreshadows the strategies of Handel’s English oratorios, creating drama through extreme contrasts of mood, rhythm, tempo and gesture. And so the violence of ‘Judicabit’ is allayed by the plangent sounds of two soprano soloists in the following chorus, ‘De torrente’. By the final chorus, with its brilliant and freeflowing interplay of voices, it’s easy to imagine the Handel of the Hallelujah Chorus.

There is something intrinsically theatrical in both the Vivaldi and the Handel works in this concert. But it’s not the storytelling theatre of a Bach Passion, that other mainstay of Easter concerts. Instead we experience Italianate fire and extravagance, and a suggestion that, while the first listeners of these works heard them in church, they were also experiencing the ‘theatre’ of religion, in all its drama and emotion.

Yvonne Frindle © 2024

No.1
Gloria, in excelsis Deo

No.2
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis

No.3
Laudamus te, benedicimus te
Adoramus te, glorificamus te

No.4
Gratias agimus tibi

No.5
Propter magnam gloriam tuam

No.6
Domine Deus
Rex coelestis
Deus Pater omnipotens

No.7
Domine Fili Unigenite
Jesu Christe

No 8
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei
Filius Patris
Qui tollis peccata mundi
miserere nobis

No.9
Qui tollis peccata mundi
suscipe deprecationem nostram

No.10
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris
misere nobis

No.11
Quoniam tu solus Sanctus
Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe

No.12
Cum Sancto Spiritu
in gloria Dei Patris, Amen

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Marilyn Phillips OAM
Pre-concert Speaker

Marilyn Phillips’ international career in music began in the Royal Academy of Music, where she was awarded the Ralph Vaughan Williams Scholarship for advanced studies in piano accompaniment. This led to performances in the major London concert halls, Europe and the USA, with frequent BBC broadcasts.

She is an elected Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and in 2001 received the Prime Minister’s Centenary Medal for services to opera in Australia. Marilyn was also awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to choral music in 2022.

Marilyn was appointed Head of Music with West Australian Opera in 1995, Chorus Director of the WASO Chorus from 2005-2013, and guest conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

She is a pre-concert speaker for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva, and WASO, and is a reviewer for the ABC magazine Limelight.