Adelaide Festival: Monteverdi Vespers

St Peter’s Cathedral, 2–3 March 2026

Pygmalion Choir and Orchestra, Raphaël Pichon

The concert began at 8pm as dusk turned to night on an unseasonably chilly late-summer evening. Outside St Peter’s Cathedral, the queue stretched right around the building. Inside, the lighting was deliberately subdued, and the Gothic space felt transformed — less like Adelaide on a Monday night, more like Europe in winter. It was the perfect setting for Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610.

This music sits on the hinge of eras. It is early Baroque, but it still carries Renaissance sacred traditions in its choral writing — and then suddenly it breaks the mould with drama, contrast and direct address, as if opera has entered the church. Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion made that “old meets new” tension feel completely natural.

The performance began with a single voice sounding from the far end of the cathedral, drawing the audience into the space before the full forces answered. Pygmalion’s sound was clear and bright, with an ease that never turned into showiness. The large psalms had weight and power, but the ensemble never pushed: they let the building carry the sound.

Although the singers and instruments were anchored in the chancel, the staging was fluid. Singers moved within the chancel, stepped forward to clarify the text, and shifted to the sides and back to change the way the cathedral responded. These movements didn’t feel like theatre pasted onto sacred music. They felt like a natural way of shaping words and sound in a huge space.

The program used Monteverdi’s score in full, with two additions: the antiphon ‘Sancta Maria, succurre miseris’ placed between Lauda Jerusalem and the Marian sonata, and a short versicle-and-response after the Magnificat. There was only one brief pause, after Lauda Jerusalem, to rearrange the forces.

Late in the work came a truly memorable moment. During Ave maris stella, the choir moved up to the gallery, lifting the sound into the heights. Then, for the Magnificat, they returned gradually in a solemn procession along the left side of the cathedral. It was simple, and it worked: the music didn’t just fill St Peter’s — it seemed to travel through it.

At the end, the whole audience rose for a standing ovation, and the applause echoed up into the cathedral roof. Walking out into the cold night, it was hard to imagine a better match of music, performers and place: a great work from 1610 made vivid, direct and completely alive.