Pinchgut Opera takes an uplifting walk in Monteverdi’s spiritual forest

A 17th century masterpiece by Claudio Monteverdi provides rich material for Pinchgut Opera’s Spiritual Forest tour.

Erin Helyard conducting the Pinchgut Opera's The Spiritual Forest performance at City Recital Hall. Picture: Cassandra Hannagan

• A night of triumph and tears
• Good things come in threes

The groundbreaking Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi was 73 years old and nearing the end of his life when in 1641 he published his masterpiece Selve morale e spirituale.

It comprised 40 works – a mixture of “spiritual” settings in Latin and “moral” madrigals in Italian – for eight singers and various instruments, depending on what was available at the time. It represents a cornucopia of glorious music from a composer who was at the height of his powers.

Pinchgut Opera’s artistic director Erin Helyard chose eight of the Latin works, bookended by two theatrical arrangements of the Dixit Dominus, the setting of Psalm 110, for the company’s latest production – a follow-up to their highly successful Monteverdi’s Vespers concerts last year. The result was a highly satisfying and multi-layered experience for the large Angel Place audience, with the eight excellent singers performing in various combinations and a small band of diverse instruments including three sackbuts (trombones), a trumpet-like cornetto, harp, theorbo and strings with Helyard switching between chamber organ and harpsichord.

The two Dixit Dominus settings were perhaps the most powerful with all musicians involved and although the texts were in Latin and not surtitled the imagery was obvious from the music. This is the Old Testament God in full flight and reading the text afterwards seems frighteningly relevant to today: “He shall judge among the nations; he shall fill them with ruins: and break the heads over populous lands”.

Erin Helyard and members of the Orchestra of the Antipodes. Picture: Cassandra Hannagan

Elsewhere the program, performed straight through without interval and with applause held until the end, offered a stunning variety of vocal and instrumental textures with a constantly changing line-up of singers – sometimes a double choir of six or five voices, sometimes a duo of sopranos or tenors and at others a solo. Each work was prefaced by an instrumental solo – Hannah Lane’s harp, Simon Martyn-Ellis’s theorbo or Helyard’s keyboards – and the trombones and cornetto made for a rich and mellow sound mix with Chloe Lankshear and Amy Moore’s pure sopranos soaring over the top.

The line-up featured some of Australia’s finest early music vocalists in mezzos Anna Fraser and Hannah Fraser, tenors Richard Butler and Louis Hurley and basses David Greco and Andrew O’Connor.

Lankshear and Hurley are both recipients of the newly created Taryn Fiebig Scholar program, set up to honour the late soprano’s contribution to Australian music and Pinchgut.

The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall Angel Place on Sunday, April 3, at 5pm.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Pinchgut Opera The Spiritual Forest by Monteverdi

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN April 2, 2022