★★★★☆ Richard Gill opens medieval windows on the sacred and profane.

City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney
March 19, 2016

There’s no doubt that Richard Gill is a very good thing, and not just for Sydney Chamber Choir. His debut concert not only offered a smart piece of programming allowing two contrasting views of the medieval – one authentic, one seen through 20th-century eyes – but he also managed to commission three young Australian composers into the bargain, enlist the aid of 70 highly impressive young singers from schools across New South Wales, and all the while inspiring his crack choir to pull off a pair of fine performances of music by Guillaume Machaut and Carl Orff.

Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame is a Marian mass ie. one specially intended to celebrate the life of the Virgin as opposed to one designed for the famous Paris cathedral. Written around 1365, it’s the first polyphonic mass to have come down to us with a composer’s name attached, and it exhibits many of the buoyant and innovative musical ideas that were to develop over the following two centuries before the Reformation put paid to the idea of music for music’s sake within...