Sopranos reach for sky for Australian Haydn Ensemble tour

Heavenly duets from two top-notch sopranos featured in the Australian Haydn Ensemble’s second tour of the year.

The Australian Haydn Ensemble performing its Heavenly Sopranos concert with Celeste Lazarenko and Helen Sherman at City Recital Hall. Picture: Oliver Miller

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One of the things that kept music lovers going during the 2021 lockdowns were the online concerts put on by many of our leading ensembles, and included in these virtual delights was a “creative corner film”, Sacro Amor, by the Australian Haydn Ensemble led by Skye McIntosh, featuring music by Antonio Vivaldi and a motet by Johann Hasse, Alta Nubes Illustrata beautifully performed by soprano Celeste Lazarenko.

She was back for a live performance of this demanding work as part of AHE’s second tour for the 2024 season, Heavenly Sopranos, in which she was featured alongside Australian British mezzo Helen Sherman.

The Australian Haydn Ensemble performing its Heavenly Sopranos concert with Celeste Lazarenko at City Recital Hall, Sydney, in April 2024. Picture: Oliver Miller

Lazarenko is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium Opera School and has built a reputation both at home and abroad, with regular appearances for Opera Australia, most recently impressing greatly in Mozart’s Idomeneo.

This concert featured two works by Hasse, who although German lived in Venice 30 years after Vivaldi died. He wrote more than 100 operas and many of his manuscripts were destroyed in the siege of Dresden in the Napoleonic Wars.

He famously said of the young Mozart: “This boy will cause us all to be forgotten.” Fortunately for us Hasse didn’t reckon with the modern-day early music revival and recording industry which has restored his works to a wider public.

The small ensemble – two violins, viola, cello, double bass, theorbo and chamber organ – got the evening off to dramatic start with the Sinfonia from Hasse’s oratorio Sancta Petrus et Sancta Maria in which St Peter and Mary Magdalene witness the Crucifixion. McIntosh chose two arias and two recitatives setting the scene and featuring Lazarenko as Mary and Sherman as Peter.

It was obvious straight away that the pair had great chemistry – Lazarenko high, pure and acrobatic, Sherman rich in her chest voice – but just how well their voices blended was shown in the second half with a magnificent performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, one of the most moving masterpieces of the Baroque, completed shortly before the composer died at 28.

The opening duet with its intertwining grief-stricken lines was beautifully handled by the “heavenly sopranos”, while the famous Fac ut ardeat cor meum – heard countless times in TV ads and film soundtracks – was positively buoyant.

McIntosh and the AHE were in top form and showed off their tight ensemble work in two movements from Concerto No. 1 in F minor by Neapolitan composer Francesco Durante (1684-1755), who counted Pergolesi among his pupils.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Australian Haydn Ensemble: Heavenly Sopranos

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN April 16, 2024