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Songs from Plague Survivors to get Digital Airing
By Barney Zwartz
The ever-inventive Australian Chamber Choir has chosen to make a virtue out of necessity by staging a special “plague concert” for our times, featuring works by composers who lived through as many as three outbreaks of plague.
Douglas Lawrence, the choir’s founder and director, had chosen a program of English renaissance music when his wife – the noted harpsichordist Elizabeth Anderson, an alto in the choir – noticed that most of the composers were bubonic plague survivors. With a little research, and a couple of changes, they had a very contemporary theme.
“There was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Sydney in 1919, and 1000 people died,” Anderson says. “There were three outbreaks in Elizabethan England before the great plague of 1665. When plague broke out in London in 1563, Queen Elizabeth moved her court to Windsor Castle, where she erected gallows and ordered that anyone coming from London be hanged.” The threat worked, and the gallows were not employed.
Another outbreak in 1592 again led the court to move, while the alehouses, theatres, fairs and parliament were all closed to reduce infection rates. A third outbreak came in 1603, soon after Elizabeth died.
Composers William Byrd and John Dowland survived all three plagues, Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins were among those who survived two, while Richard Farrant and Henry Purcell each survived one. All are represented in the concert, in the beautiful acoustic of Mandeville Hall, on Sunday (SUBS: May 24), which will be streamed live on the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall.
Lawrence says: “Until more recently, when we get to Holst and Vaughan Williams, it was the greatest period of English composition. It’s monumentally wonderful music.”
The eight singers were not able to rehearse until lockdown restrictions were eased after May 13, and sing with at least a metre and a half between each.
“It’s not easy to sing separated like that, but with this class of singers it won’t really present a problem – it’s just distance. Really good musicians are constantly listening to each other, sometimes with horror, of course!” Lawrence jokes.
Unified pronunciation is hugely important in a small a cappella group, he says, and of course they have to sing the right notes, but the overwhelmingly vital aspect that makes a chamber choir stand out is tuning, or the blend.
The chamber choir he founded 13 years ago has established an international reputation, touring Europe several times to five-star reviews. Lawrence has also been director of music at Scots Presbyterian Church in the city for some 35 years, and there is considerable cross-over between that choir and the chamber choir.
Scots Church is continuing to pay Lawrence, his assistant, the principal singers and choral scholars throughout the pandemic.
“They decided that within a few days of the shutter coming down, and it’s remarkable – it’s not happening anywhere else to my knowledge,” he says. “Respect for the music is their tradition. Dame Nellie Melba both started and ended her career in that choir.”
Meanwhile, Anderson has a theme rolling now. The chamber choir’s June concert will be an “influenza concert” after she learned that the word influenza was invented by an Italian doctor in 1510, wondering whether it was “influenced” by the position of the stars.