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Canberra Today 17°/20° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / Rarefied music with a Dutch accent

Van Stade conducts, Sevenster in background
Van Stade conducts, Sevenster in background
“EENDRACHT”, as countless Aussie schoolchildren know, is the name of the ship on which Dutch navigator Dirk Hartog travelled to WA, landing on October 25, 1616, and nailing his famous pewter plate to a post well before the Brits made landfall in Terra Australis.

Coro chamber music ensemble was quick to engage Dutch musician and conductor Koen van Stade to create a concert marking 400 years since that well-studied event.

The music of legendary Dutch composer Jan Pieterzoon Sweelinck, “the Orpheus of Amsterdam”, formed the centre of this cleverly curated program.

 Roland Peelman on harpsichord
Roland Peelman on harpsichord.
But not before Coro had performed the  magnificent “Motet O Quam Gloriosum” by Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, interspersed with Antonio de Cabezon’s “Differecias Sobre La Gallarda Milanesa,” performed on harpsichord by Roland Peelman.

That, as Belgium-born Peelman later remarked, got the Spaniards out of the way, for the organisers of the concert had not forgotten that even as Hartog was ploughing his way through the seas, Spain’s conquest of  The Low Countries was causing humiliation and oppression in the areas now known as the Netherlands and Belgium.

While the first five-part program had allowed Coro, which specialises in refined Latinate works that Hamlet would have called caviar to the general, the second half, subtitled “Dutch Revolt – and glory” assumed a very different quality.

The substance of the section consisted of Sweelinck’s beautiful settings in the French language of several psalms, usually introduced with a unison tenor section followed by quite elaborate polyphony.

But these were interspersed with works in the Dutch vernacular by Adrianus Valerius and Constantijn Huygens, with rendition of “Hoe groot, O Heer,” performed by Peelman and new Coro member Frank Den Hartog, a serendipitous name considering the occasion.

Coro in St Paul's
Coro in St Paul’s
This was immediately followed with a fiery patriotic rendition of “Merck toch hoe sterck” delivered at a rapid pace by Maartje Sevenster with film and again with Peelman at the harpsichord. With words such as “many a Spaniard withered away” (we had English translations of all the works) you could just tell what the Dutch thought of their colonial masters.

Perhaps the highlight of this concert was to be found in tender renditions of Huygens’s Psalm 12, performed by van Stade himself and Psalm 3 performed by bass Andrew Fysh, both supported by Peelman.

After such grandeur, there was an almost jaunty quality to the final Sweelinck work “Vanitas vanitatum” performed by Coro as they processed down the central aisle of St Paul’s.

This unusual concert of music rarely heard in Australia proved a clever way of celebrating the unique beginnings of the Dutch-Australian relationship.

All photos by Peter Hislop.

 

 

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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