2021 | Welcome

It is a great pleasure to welcome to you to the first half of Sydney Chamber Choir’s 2021 season.

Our aim is simple: to fill your life with the finest choral music. Whether at a major concert to which you have been looking forward for weeks, or in watching a short video of the choir on YouTube with your morning coffee, we hope our singing is a part of your life.

Choral music has experienced a hiatus for much of 2020 but history shows us that it is impossible for people to resist the expressive power of the voice to put into sound the full range of human emotion. Our repertoire stretches back through centuries, giving us an insight into how past generations made sense of their lives, but just as crucial to Sydney Chamber Choir’s offering is music of our time and our place. To this end we are delighted to offer two world premieres of major works: in March, Paul Stanhope will conduct the choir in the first performance of his Requiem, exquisitely paired with music by James MacMillan, Mary Finsterer and Tomás Luis de Victoria. In June, we will perform a new work by Joe Twist which explores our relationship with the natural world.

We begin the year with an appearance at the Sydney Festival, performing Cycles, a program which charts the patterns which structure our lives – the seasons in Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year and the passage through life to death in David Conte’s Invocation and Dance both leave strong impressions on the imagination. This concert will also feature the world premiere of Minga Bagan by Indigenous composer Brenda Gifford, an acknowledgment of mother earth and our shared role in caring for our environment.

You can also hear the choir in two concerts in May: we are pleased to be the guests of our friends, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, presenting four Australian works in their Voyage of Musical Discovery at the City Recital Hall. We will also give the premiere of Solander, a new work by Kate Reid, exploring the life and work of Daniel Solander, the Swedish botanist who accompanied Joseph Banks in the documentation of the magnificent flora of Australia.

We look forward to sharing information about our concerts in the second half of the year as the time draws nearer. To our loyal audience, we thank you for your support. To those new to Sydney Chamber Choir’s work, there has never been a better time to explore the intriguing worlds of choral music.

Sam Allchurch
Artistic Director