50th Anniversary
• 1975- 2025 •
50th Anniversary • 1975- 2025 •
Introducing our
2025 Program
What’s special about a chamber choir? As Sydney Chamber Choir prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, I find myself taking a moment to consider what brings people to our particular corner of the musical world.
A chamber choir is an ensemble where you can enter into a musical conversation easily, both as a singer and as a listener. You can hear all the different lines with their individual ideas and phrasings, switching from the tenors to the altos, from the basses to the sopranos. You can also take an aural step back and allow the sound to wash over you. You can enjoy the clarity of hearing the text clearly, and ponder what the composer might be trying to say. You can get to know the individual singers – the inflections in their voices, the emotion they feel while singing everything from Bach to The Beatles.
In 2025, we are celebrating 50 years of concerts, commissions and collaborations, and in doing so, we celebrate the art of the chamber choir.
“
Welcome
We embark on a new collaboration, with Leipzig-based vocal quintet Ensemble Nobiles – they will visit us here in Sydney in February and then we will travel to Germany in May for the Bonhoeffer Project, a set of new works by composers from around the world, reflecting on the significant life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 20th-century fighter for justice.
In April, we present one of the gems of the choral repertoire, Gabriel Fauré's setting of the Requiem, featuring the newly installed Dobson organ at St James' King St under the masterful hands (and feet) of Thomas Wilson.
In July, we are hosting a birthday party in City Recital Hall where we celebrate one of the central aims of the choir over its 50 years – the commissioning and performance of new works by Australian composers. When we gave the world premiere of Paul Stanhope’s Requiem in 2021, the audience knew they had experienced something special. This watershed work will be heard again in this concert, and it is my hope that it will take its place in the repertoire alongside the great settings of Mozart, Fauré and Duruflé. We will give the premiere of five new works commissioned for this anniversary from Luke Byrne, Anne Cawrse, Meta Cohen, Nardi Simpson and Paul Stanhope.
In September, we reflect on the great legacy of the choir and invite former Musical Directors Nicholas Routley and Paul Stanhope back to conduct a performance of a cappella music from around the world.
We conclude our jubilee season with the best possible bang – the Mass in B minor by J.S. Bach, a work regarded by many as the pinnacle of the choral art form. For this concert, we will be joined by our long-term collaborators, The Muffat Collective, led by Matthew Greco.
I invite you to join us in 2025 for a musical feast and a great party to celebrate 50 years of the Sydney Chamber Choir.
Sam Allchurch
Artistic Director
SPECIAL EVENT
Bonhoeffer Project
Sunday, 23 February
3pm
Big Schoolroom, Sydney Grammar School
College Street, Darlinghurst
Join Sydney Chamber Choir and award-winning German vocal quintet Ensemble Nobiles for a concert marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two. With works by Australian, German, New Zealand, UK and US composers, this is deeply affecting music that speaks to the importance of our shared humanity.
Fauré Requiem
Saturday, 5 April
5pm
St James' Church
173 King Street, Sydney
Celebrate the warmth and wonder of the choral sound with Gabriel Fauré’s sublime and radiant Requiem. Blending the pure lines of Gregorian chant with the elegance and intensity of his own melodic genius, wrapped in delicate yet sensually lush harmonies, Fauré re-invented the Requiem in the image of love. Gentle, tender and infinitely compassionate, this is an intimate musical embrace that speaks straight to the heart with courage and honesty.
50th Anniversary Gala
Saturday, 5 July
3pm
City Recital Hall
2 Angel Place, Sydney
Celebrate the beauty and thrill of new music, as we give the world premieres of five pieces commissioned from Australia’s most exciting compositional talents. Then experience the emotional power of Paul Stanhope’s groundbreaking re-imagining of the Requiem mass, its ancient texts enriched with contemporary insights on love, loss, life and hope.
Connections
Sunday, 28 September
3pm
Verbrugghen Hall,
Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Celebrate the rich diversity of the great traditions of sacred music. Renaissance solemnity, lush Romanticism, the transcendence of Baltic composers, and three dramatic Australian masterpieces: travel with us across centuries and continents, guided by the musical directors who have shaped the Choir from its beginning to the present day – and beyond!
Bach Mass in B minor
Saturday, 22 November
5pm
City Recital Hall
2 Angel Place, Sydney
Celebrate the brilliance of Bach’s final and greatest choral masterpiece: his magnificent Mass in B minor. Bach’s music resonates beyond place and time; reaching up to the splendour of heaven, it draws on the full spectrum of human emotion—grief and joy intertwined, anguish and elation soaring in intricate harmonies, elevating the human spirit with every note.
“I sense that with a small ensemble like ours, the audience gets to know us over the course of attending concerts. With the diversity of our repertoire and the calibre of the singers, the intentional presence of certain voices at times is just as important as blend, in communicating the text and music. There is an intimacy and a connection there that is made and remade.”
Rose Trevelyan
Soprano