Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Please note that this event has been postponed due to Covid-19 - new date to be confirmed.

At a time when lockdowns and isolation have given us pause to delve deep inside ourselves, and with the natural world increasingly threatened by the destruction of human activity, this program speaks to big questions about our relationships with each other and with our planet.

Gardens were a fertile source of metaphors for the composer of the renaissance. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s breezy Vidi speciosam and Clemens non Papa’s lush Ego flos campi offer a vision of a divinely ordered perfect landscape, setting the exquisite poetry of the Song of Songs. The return of spring in Monteverdi’s heart-wrenching Zefiro torna makes the loss of love all the more tragic.

Benjamin Britten’s music explores ideas of the soul and its creativity. His radical Hymn to St Cecilia is a paean to music as an expression of the soul, and a lament for the loss of childhood innocence. The sacred soul of the Virgin Mary is the subject of two smaller works: Rosa mystica and Hymn to the Virgin, written when the composer was only 17.

The centrepiece of the program is a new song cycle by Australian composer Joseph Twist which responds to the realities of dealing with climate change and caring for the natural world. Specially commissioned for Sydney Chamber Choir, this piece sets poetry by Australian writers past and present.

SYDNEY CHAMBER CHOIR
SAM ALLCHURCH Conductor

Program

CLEMENS NON PAPA - Ego flos campi
MONTEVERDI - Zefiro torna
VICTORIA - Vidi speciosam
BRITTEN - Hymn to the Virgin; Hymn to St Cecilia; Rosa mystica
JOE TWIST - An Australian Song Cycle (World premiere)

Featured non-Australian music: Clemens Non Papa, Monteverdi, Victoria, Britten

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on 1300 661 738

Featured Australian Works

An Australian Song Cycle : SATB choir with piano (2021) by Joseph Twist — World premiere — performed by Sam Allchurch and Sydney Chamber Choir

Featured artists

• Performer Sydney Chamber Choir
• Conductor Sam Allchurch