Choir holds mirror to Renaissance
Sydney Chamber Choir’s recent joint performances with the University of Newcastle Chamber Choir provided a fresh perspective on Renaissance and contemporary choral writing.
The concerts, entitled “Renaissance Reflections” were Sydney Chamber Choir’s first collaboration with the award-winning Newcastle choir, winner of the Adult Choir category in the ABC Classic FM Choir of the Year 2006 and Seven Network’s Battle of the Choirs in 2008.
In a program featuring some seldom-heard Renaissance masterpieces alongside 20th century works that reflect in various ways on the earlier period, the two choirs combined for two 40-part motets. These works served as “bookends” to the concerts: Tallis’s Spem in Alium, which Sydney Chamber Choir had previously performed to critical acclaim with the Tallis Scholars during their 2007 Australian tour, provided a rousing finale while a more reflective 20th century response to Tallis’s masterpiece, Sanctum Est Verum Lumen by British composer Gabriel Jackson, set a more reflective mood at the start of the concerts.
The first of these two performances was presented on 30 August 2008 by Musica Viva Australia as part of its annual Newcastle Concert Series. A long-term Newcastle subscriber said of the concert: “For me it was the most memorable I have been to in many years – it was stunning.”
The Sydney concert a week later was part of Sydney Chamber Choir’s own 2008 Sydney concert season and marked the Choir’s first performance in several years in the splendid Great Hall of the University of Sydney – a venue with acoustics and ambience admirably suited to the musical textures of this program.
Completing the program were the exquisite sounds of Josquin’s L’homme Armé mass (another Renaissance masterpiece so demanding of singers’ technique and stamina that it is rarely performed live in concert) and Allegri’s Miserere, as well as Lux Aeterna by Sydney Chamber Choir’s musical director, Paul Stanhope.