Choir tempts fate in fine style for 50th birthday

The Age

08-07-2025

MUSIC
Sydney Chamber Choir
50th Anniversary Gala
City Recital Hall, July 5
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Celebrating a 50th birthday with a requiem is certainly tempting fate. However, it was worth the risk for the Sydney Chamber Choir to select Paul Stanhope's Requiem (2021), one of the finest of the many commissioned pieces from its first half-century, to be the major work in its anniversary gala.
By splicing choral settings of six poems by female writers with settings of the Latin liturgical text, Stanhope has created a rich musical meditation on loss and hope that resonates with monuments of the Western tradition while honouring the expressions of Australian Indigenous culture as expressed in the words of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
The Introit grows from humble, chant-like passages to a luminously ecstatic moment in a manner that recalls the shape of Faure's Requiem yet within a totally different musical utterance.
The next movement, a setting of Noonuccal's Tree Grave, mixed soprano Brooke Window's bright, pure sound with dragging Mahlerian lines from the small ensemble of harp, percussion and wind instruments.
The Kyrie breaks away from this mood with sharply defined rhythm before florid passages welcoming rain by Neela Nath Das. The setting of Noonuccal's Song joined leanly expressive singing from tenor Richard Butler with delicately transparent expressions of pain from harp and woodwind before a brief but quickly suppressed outburst near the close.
In contrast to the traditional reverential breadth usually given to the Sanctus, Stanhope conjures holiness with irregular rhythms and angular liveliness reminiscent of Stravinsky. The Agnus Dei, the emotional centre of the work, incorporates a setting of Mary Elizabeth Frye's poem Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep by the soloists, underpinned by solemn intonations of both Latin and English words from the choir.
Noonuccal's Dawn Wail for the Dead was preceded by a horn solo in burnished half-light from Euan Harvey. The last two movements return to the chant-like ideas of the opening, and the closing passages mix rekindled hope with lively bird-like snatches from the woodwind for Emily Dickinson's 'Hope' is the Thing with Feathers.
Stanhope's use of vernacular poetry to humanise the Latin text recalls Britten's War Requiem but the expressive voice remains distinctively his own.