Above: Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Festival Chorus with Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra and baritone Samuel Dale Johnson, led by Elizabeth Scott. Featured photo: Conductor Elizabeth Scott. Photos by Keith Saunders.
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ slogans of ‘Voice, Energy, Joy’ were brilliantly displayed in the first Festival Chorus concert for 2026. This 450-voice-strong community choir presented an expressive programme celebrating the beauty the solo and choral voice. The vibrant presentation of the loved Requiem Op. 9 by Duruflé, reaching back to the original 1947 orchestral accompaniment was matched by the bombastic, joyous Poulenc Gloria, composed just a dozen years later is a great contrast. Regardless of style and language it celebrates the power of the choral voice and offers up to the collaborating soloist and conductor Elizabeth Scott some substantial, elevated gestures to work with.
A new Australian work in World Premiere always provides great energy in a programme, and this concert’s inclusion of Carl Vine’s latest work for Choir, orchestra and baritone solo certainly did that. This work, dealing with love and death, with text from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64 suggested to the composer by Festival Chorus soprano Min Zhu, was a successful use of the immense Festival Chorus vocal resources, the orchestra and the dramatic power plus focus of operatic baritone Samuel Dale Johnson.
Working closely and expertly with the chorus, Johnson delivered the lines of poetry with a fine edge. Carl Vine’s solid construction of this work featured a tight tapestry of orchestral environment, plaintive solo delivery of the fragmented rhyming poetry and a choral ‘conscience’, almost Greek Chorus-like reiteration and continuing of the baritone utterances around the soloist.
Above: Australian Composer Carl Vine, who set Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64 in his new work ‘Time’s Fell Hand’ for baritone, orchestra and choir, premiered during this concert. Photo: Keith Saunders.
The sensitivities of this new work, Time’s Fell Hand, may have been lost with four hundrred and fifty voices and orchestra. However, clarity and interplay was delicate with the Festival Chorus and this orchestra, in the resurrected Sydney Opera House Concert Hall acoustic harnessed impressively by Elizabeth Scott.
Lines such as ‘That time will come and take my love away’ or ‘But weep to have that which it fears to lose’ were not smothered by the forces, and the journey through the sonnet was colourful, clever and employed soloist, instrumental accompaniment and choir from above in a thrilling new way. This energetic, joyous moment celebrating the voice the choral voice and transforming Shakespeare’s poetic, romantic voice was one to lose ourselves in and be proud of.
Above: Baritone soloist Samuel Dale Johnson. Photo: Operabase
The concert started with the evergreen Church Music favourite, Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. But not as many had heard it. My last Concert Hall exposure to this work, rich in harmonised chant and beautiful layering of emotion plus vocal effect was in the version for small choir and organ, carved out deftly by the choristers of the Choir of King’s College Cambridge.
This version’s fine skeleton and purity was further developed from the later arrangement for choir with organ. Here the Festival Chorus and large orchestra presented the dreaminess, the colours of harmonised plainchant and the intense drama possible when the latin Mass For The Dead text resonates across a large chorus, orchestra, adult soloists.
Although Duruflé did not have a Festival Chorus of so many numbers to premiere his work, he would be happy with the clarity, variety of sound and commitment to the text of this Sydney Philharmonia Choirs performance. Voice parts great in number presenting chant lins were crisp, clean and even. Even more exciting was the impact possible with orchestra and this huge choir in sections of text such as the ‘Dominus Jesu Christe’ or the ‘Libera me’ for the choir in the ‘Domine Jesu Christe’, where concepts of souls being rescued and the terrible nature of Judgement Day are to the fore.
Above: mezzo-soprano soloist Helen Sherman Photo: Clare Egan.
Baritone Soloist Samuel Dale Johnson brought lines of Latin text to life as easily and solidly as he also did in the Carl Vine work to follow. His even, strong tone and shaping of the drama early in the concert within his Requiem solos indicated clean emotion and vocal colouring to come. Stillness and smoothness enhanced anything sung during this work by mezzo-soprano Helen Sherman, including her tracing of the nuanced, non-Faure-shape ‘Pie Jesu’.
A true excitement for me in this event’s programme was going out with a blast via the Poulenc Gloria FP 177. Ideal for this concert’s assembled forces, this performance once more showed off the volume, agility and sensitivity of the Festival Choir. The group welcomed and worked again so well with the third solo operatic voice for this concert – this time Meechot Marrero, who furnished the performance with Poulenc’s angular, atypical celebrations of the soprano voice for his very ‘now’ setting of the ancient text.
Above: Meechot Marrero performs the Poulenc Gloria. Photo Keith Saunders.
Even though this work emerged at the more pious end of Poulenc’s career that included an allegiance to the cheeky, tradition-defying compositional group, ‘Les Six’, there is much humour or unexpected gesturing in this Gloria. From the fanfare-like opening, through the virtuoso filigree of the soprano when pitted against the choir commentary, the orchestral colourisations up to the expressive soprano Amens to end , this work is a delight. And delivered with suitable momentum here as it reverently and irreverently uses fine writing for the combined forces to pay tribute to the Catholic Mass setting tradition.
If this was a first hearing live of the Poulenc Gloria for anyone in the crowd, what a way to be gifted exposure to what is now a classic of a very unique musical figure from twentieth century France. And in a concert including new Australian music plus more traditional twentieth century sacred text setting, this was a treat of curation for lovers of choir music and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.
We next hear the Festival Chorus on October 17 2026 when they are joined by the Sydney Youth Orchestra, Conservatorium High School Treble Voices, soloists and three conductors for a presentation of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
