Full orchestra with choir
- Browse all Full orchestra with choir works
- Browse all CDs featuring Full orchestra with choir
- Browse all artists who have written works for Full orchestra with choir
Australian choral works with orchestra
Given modern Australia’s British roots, it is no surprise that the Choral Society, or its heirs and assigns, survives as a major musical organisation in most capital cities. And as well as merely serving up a diet of Messiahs and Belshazzar’s Feasts, many have commissioned new works. Resident composers since Isaac Nathan, who arrived in 1841, have composed choral works of various kinds; Eugene Goossens’s The Apocalypse of 1954 out-Waltoned Walton but failed to set the world on fire. Subsequent choral-orchestral works have in the main tended to be in the oratorio tradition, often specifically for public ceremonial events, such as Barry Conyngham’s Antipodes for Victoria’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 1985, or Peter Sculthorpe’s Child of Australia for the national Bicentenary in 1988. Others, like Moya Henderson in her recent work based on the Anna Akhmatova Requiem, use the choral-orchestral forces to explore important humanitarian and political issues.
Representative works
Work | Notes | |
---|---|---|
A fringe of leaves (1982) by Brian Howard | this work for wordless double chorus and strings dramatises the Eliza Fraser shipwreck story, as fictionalised in Patrick White’s novel of the same title. | |
| Requiem (2004) by Peter Sculthorpe | brings together the traditional Latin Mass for the dead with Aboriginal traditions, melodies and sounds. |
Through the fire (2003) by Gordon Kerry | commemorates the trauma of the 2003 bushfires (two soloists, chorus and orchestra). | |
Mourning and the light within (2006) by John Peterson | brings together words from Ecclesiastes and the medieval Stabat mater to mourn the deaths of children in the Beslan siege. | |
| Spell of creation (2000) by Nigel Butterley | this work for soloists, semi-chorus, choir and orchestra is a summation of the composer’s lifelong syncretic spiritual interests |
Passion according to St Mark (2009) by Mills, Richard | in the tradition of the Bach Passions dramatises and comments on Mark’s account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion, with verses from the prophets, psalms and Dante’s vision of Paradise. |