Pinchgut Opera take us inside Sistine Chapel for some eternal light

Everyone knows about Michelangelo’s ceiling, but Pinchgut Opera takes inside another Sistine Chapel masterpiece.

Erin Helyard conducting Pinchgut Opera's Eternal Light concert at City Recital Hall. Picture: Anna Kucera

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The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is home to two masterpieces. Tourists flock to see Michelangelo’s ceiling, but for decades it was also the only place where you could hear Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere sung, and then only during Holy Week with the lights out.

Written in 1638 it has become the stuff of legends: Mozart heard it as a 14-year-old and managed to transcribe it from memory and Mendelssohn also made an arrangement which included all those famous high Cs. Then in 1963 the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, recorded it and it became an overnight sensation.

But that edition got it wrong, and Pinchgut Opera’s artistic director Erin Helyard wanted to put things right in its latest concert by directing performances of the “faulty” Miserere we all know and love alongside one in which Australian tenor Jacob Lawrence has attempted to recreate the original ornamentations for which the Sistine Chapel singers were so famous and secretive.

The two versions bookended a stunning 75-minute concert over two performances in the City Recital Hall, with the houselights dimmed and the stage lit by small banks of LED lights and some gently wafting smoke capturing the faint scent of incense and candle wax.

Lawrence’s version which opened the afternoon may have lacked the high Cs but instead there were some elaborate melisma passages highlighting the skills of five soloists – sopranos Lana Kains and Bonnie de la Hunty, mezzo Olivia Payne, tenor Louis Hurley and bass Andrew O’Connor – and a four-strong chorus of soprano, countertenor, tenor and bass.

Erin Helyard conducting from the keyboard. Picture: Anna Kucera

For the other works in the recital Helyard directed a group of 12 musicians, led by Julia Fredersdorff, artistic director of the Tasmanian Baroque band Van Diemens Land. Three sackbuts, early ancestors of the modern trombone, formed a mellow and rich brass bedrock for the strings, harp and theorbo in two sonatas by 17th century Austrian composer-violinist Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, and Helyard featured in an organ solo, Johann Pachelbel’s Ciacona in F minor.

At the centre of the program was a magnificent performance of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Requiem which was composed more than 50 years after Allegri’s Miserere. This is a substantial work – more than 40 minutes long – and features some majestic orchestral writing as well as challenging solos and ensemble singing.

Helyard led with customary precision from the keyboard and singers and the Orchestra of the Antipodes musicians responded in kind.

The lofty top Cs of the familiar version of the Miserere – delivered with bell-like clarity by Kains perched in the balcony high above the stage – brought this uplifting concert to a glorious end.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Pinchgut Opera: Eternal Light

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN August 24, 2024