The Australian Chamber Choir’s latest musical offering – Agatha in Vivaldi’s Venice – is a feast of choral music stretching over two centuries from the mid-1500s to the mid-1700s.

Saturday’s opening concert was held in St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, dovetailing with the Hamilton Gallery’s highly successful exhibition Emerging from Darkness: Faith, Emotion and the Body in the Baroque. Concert-goers were invited to attend a pre-concert gallery tour for a potted history of baroque art in Europe and the role of women – restricted though it was – in baroque.

Australian Chamber Choir performs Agatha in Vivaldi’s Venice at St Andrew’s, Hamilton. Photo © Elizabeth Quinn

In spite of the patriarchal influence of the Catholic Church and the legal restraints imposed on women artists and composers, the legacy of female painters such as Artemisia Gentileschi endures to this day. Less well-known, but central to the ACC’s concert program, was the music of little-known baroque composer Agatha della Pièta. Left as a baby at a Venetian orphanage, she went on to perform and compose music under the tutelage of Antonio Vivaldi, then the music master at the Ospedale della Pièta in which Agatha grew up and spent her whole life.

Thanks to the detective skills and perseverance of ACC manager Elizabeth Anderson (you can read her account here), fragments of the manuscripts of a cantata by Agatha – untouched for over three centuries – were retrieved from the archives of a Venetian library and re-worked into a close approximation of the original work.

Saturday’s program started in the Renaissance period with a delightful rendition of Giache de Wert’s 1558 madrigal Cara la vita mia, the secular inspiration for the work that followed it, Claudio Merulo’s less well-known mass of the same name. The transition from the secular to the sacred, written 50 years apart, was a gentle reminder of the gradual move towards the baroque and an indication of the care taken with the program selection.

Heu me Domine, a motet from the late Renaissance period, was the work of Vicente Lusitano, one of the earliest known composers of African descent.

Musicians from oppressed populations, like Lusitano and Agatha della Pièta, ran the risk of being overshadowed by those from more privileged backgrounds and Lusitano’s richly layered polyphonic piece has only recently come back into public consciousness. Written as an exercise to prove a point rather than as a performance piece, it is notoriously difficult to sing. The choir did an excellent job of navigating the lengthy chromatic passages with nary a false note.

A delightful rendition of Monteverdi’s Lauda Jerusalem brought us to the convergence of the Renaissance and Baroque periods with its combination of exuberance and reverence. From there we were introduced to the ‘complete’ Cantata of Agatha della Pièta as realised by Anderson and performed by the ACC with the addition of strings and harpsichord.

The joyous first movement was quite a spine-tingling moment for the audience in the small church, knowing we were among the first few hundred people in the world to hear this skilful reconstruction of the mid-18th century work. The instrumental accompaniment added depth and the result was generally very pleasing. The solo parts were performed by choir members to varying degrees of success, possibly reflecting the degree of difficulty of certain passages rather than individual capacity.

Vivaldi’s Magnificat was a fitting finale, performed by choir and orchestra – with a little competition from passing flocks of cockatoos.

The commitment of the ACC to take choral music to regional areas is another reason to applaud this fine group of singers and the community of Hamilton demonstrated its gratitude in enthusiastic style at concert’s end.

Australian Chamber Choir presents Agatha in Vivaldi’s Venice at the Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, Geelong (21 April); the Scots’ Church, corner of Russell and Collins Sts, Melbourne (5 May); the Church of the Resurrection, Macedon (25 May), and in Venice on 16 July at Palazzo Pisani.

For information on Australian Chamber Choir concerts and its upcoming European tour, visit the company website.