Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 28 Feb 2026
As part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, French choir and orchestra Pygmalion made an arresting Australian debut with Bach: Good Night World, directed by founder Raphaël Pichon. For listeners attuned to the possibilities of early music, and for novices, this was a performance of depth and refinement.
The concert began almost casually: players drifted onstage to adjust chairs and stands, testing the acoustic with fragments of tuning before withdrawing off stage. Yet the formal entrance marked a transformation. In the generous acoustic of the Adelaide Town Hall, ten voices and ten instrumentalists produced a sonority of remarkable amplitude and focus. The blend was seamless; the contrapuntal lines etched with crystalline clarity. What might appear to be modest forces sounded vast—an object lesson in disciplined ensemble singing and historically informed instrumental performance underscored with precise articulation and phrasing.
The name Pygmalion alludes to the mythic sculptor whose creation was animated into life and is an apt metaphor for the ensemble’s artistic philosophy. Their work is not merely reconstruction but rebirth: overlooked or underperformed Baroque repertoire—much of it French—is approached with scholarly commitment as well as theatrical imagination. Text and music are treated as inextricably joined, their impact heightened through exquisite phrasing and beautifully controlled dynamic nuance.
The program, comprising thirteen works arranged in four groupings, was structured around music written in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). The devastation of that conflict—demographic, political and spiritual, with an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldier and civilian casualties, and some areas in Germany suffering up to a fifty percent loss of population—formed the backdrop to works by Adam Drese, Daniel Speer, Dieterich Buxtehude, members of the Bach family, Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, Melchior Franck, Heinrich Schütz and Hans Leo Hassler. Rather than presenting them as disconnected compositions, Pichon sequenced them as a contemplation on anguish, endurance and healing.
The opening soprano solo, Drese’s Nun ist alles überwunden, immediately established the ensemble’s aesthetic. Sung with a pure, unforced straight tone and superb pitch, the vocal line carried effortlessly through the hall.
If that wasn’t compelling enough, Speer’s Ach wie elend was the stuff of goosebumps. Pichon deployed the choir throughout the hall—in doorways, along the sides, even in the aisles of the balcony—so that the canon unfolded spatially as well as musically. The effect was immersive without being theatricalised for its own sake: polyphony circulated through every crevice of the Adelaide Town Hall, surrounding and enveloping the listener. It was eery but deeply satisfying sensurround! Some audience instinctively turned toward to locate the unseen singers, and this testified to the potency of the moment. The ‘architectural’ strategy was again used later in the program to great effect. Applause, though formally reserved for the end of each bracket, often broke out spontaneously—a natural response to such immediacy—and was received with gracious composure by the ensemble. They never lost momentum.
The concert proceeded with cumulative force, each work deepening the emotional path laid out before us. Even a snapped cello string—repaired efficiently and without fuss off-stage—served as a reminder of the palpable immediacy of live performance.
Pichon conducts with economy. His gestures are precise, unexaggerated, yet charged with intent and purpose. When he expands his physical language, it is purposeful and galvanising; the ensemble responds as one, and with immediacy. Pichon also demonstrates a keen understanding of ‘musical dramaturgy’, not only in sound but in movement: the choreographed positioning and processing of singers as they took their places was executed with almost ritual grace.
To describe Pygmalion as “world class” is accurate rather than inflated. This was music-making of rare expressivity. It was intellectually rigorous, technically superb, and profoundly moving. The music sounded fresh and possessed a satisfying sense of ‘newness’.
The performance was much more than a concert: it was a palpable demonstration of the enduring capacity of early music to speak eloquently and clearly to a modern audience as if it were for the first time.
Pygmalion produces music that makes the world turn and the human heartbeat: they produce the music of the spheres.
Just stunning.
Kym Clayton
When: 28 Feb
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
