Musical time-travel courtesy of the Apollo Ensemble and Sydney’s Great Synagogue.

The Great Synagogue, Sydney

January 14, 2014

If you’re a sucker for a site-specific classical musical event (and I confess that I most certainly am) then this one would definitely have been for you. Hot on the heels of The Tallis Scholars singing Renaissance polyphony in St Mary’s Cathedral at the back end of last year, here we had five period instrumentalists and two superb singers transporting us back in a musical TARDIS to Amsterdam’s Esnoga, more commonly known as the Portuguese Synagogue, and performed in Sydney’s most impressive building dedicated to the Jewish Faith – the appropriately named Great Synagogue.

The Victorian grandeur of the interior with its whipped cream plasterwork, ornate Ark and commanding Bimah made the perfect setting for a bit of musical drama which, on the whole, was what we got. A plethora of composers were represented, some Jewish, some not, some obscure, some almost totally forgotten in a program designed for contrast rather than representing an attempt at a liturgical reconstruction of any kind.

The works ranged from mini cantatas like Mani’s Le-El Nora (think Arne but in Hebrew) – an appropriately jolly setting written to...