Ed Shuttle and Natalie Shea from the Sydney Chamber Choir recently answered some of our questions in the lead up to the SCC’s upcoming performance at Lazenby Hall on 3 May, conducted by the iconic Richard Gill
In the two years since Richard Gill took over as Music Director, what new directions has the Choir taken?
There have been two main areas of development. As you may know, Richard is not only one of Australia’s leading choral conductors, he is also a massive advocate for music education and the involvement of youth in music making.
So there has been a definite directional shift in the cooperative use of young resources in some of our concerts. The best example was the very first concert under his musical direction which included Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. In two performances we joined forces with the NSW Arts Unit premium choir of secondary age students who sang with Sydney Chamber Choir in the majority of choruses. In addition, Richard auditioned many primary age children from the Blue Mountains, who then performed in front of a 600-person audience at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre. Surely something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.
Secondly, Richard is not only our Music Director, but he is also the Music Director of the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra (ARCO), a specialist in historically informed style on period instruments consisting of Australian instrumentalists from around the world. In Richard’s time with the choir, there has been a trend towards performing larger works requiring the resources of a major orchestra – Haydn’s Nelson Mass, Britten’s Saint Nicolas, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas… We’ve just done a joint concert with ARCO which paired a Mozart mass with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
Obviously, there’s a difference in size between a concert choir and a chamber choir, but what differences in sound can audiences enjoy with a smaller vocal ensemble?
Large concert choirs tend to consist of auditioned but not necessarily trained voices of around 30 per part; this is certainly the case with the major concert choirs in Australia. The sound produced can, of course, be exquisite and producing many variances in tone, timbre and dynamic. But in the end, it is a “large” sound given the number of choristers and there are some musical nuances that may be difficult to achieve
Sydney Chamber Choir, on the other hand, consists of around 24 choristers all of whom have trained voices, and many of whom are semi-professional, and who have sung together for many years….new members do join, but there is a strong core with an average tenure of 12 years or more.
The sound produced by such a group has a cohesion that is difficult to match by a large choir. This results in a closer blend of voices and a vocal and musical agility which enables the conductor to have an almost unlimited choice of musical interpretation. A young conductor once described the responsiveness from the choir as being like driving a Ferrari!
The tone and pitch is highly likely to be uniform and accurate, and a small but highly trained ensemble can produce extraordinary passages of very quiet and emotive sound together with a full robust sound.
What’s it like travelling and performing with such a large ensemble and are you looking forward to visiting the New England?
Touring is GREAT!
In recent years we’ve made international tours to northern Spain, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and within Australia to Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle, the Central West and Canberra.
From a social perspective, it is relaxing and bonding. But more importantly, from a musical perspective, it gives a special level of focus that you don’t get with a one-off performance. It’s also a chance for us to share our music with new audiences. Our last visit to the New England area was many years ago but we still remember the warm and enthusiastic reception you gave us then, and we’re looking forward to renewing the friendship.
How was the repertoire chosen for this concert?
We wanted to take our audiences on a journey through the rich, extraordinary world of choral singing. It’s a 1000-year history, which is a lot to cover in a single concert, but we’ve started at the beginning, with some medieval plainchant, and come right up to present-day Australia, with as many of the highlights from in between as we could fit in!
Obviously, there’s a difference in size between a concert choir and a chamber choir, but what differences in sound can audiences enjoy with a smaller vocal ensemble?
Large concert choirs tend to consist of auditioned but not necessarily trained voices of around 30 per part; this is certainly the case with the major concert choirs in Australia. The sound produced can, of course, be exquisite and producing many variances in tone, timbre and dynamic. But in the end, it is a “large” sound given the number of choristers and there are some musical nuances that may be difficult to achieve
Sydney Chamber Choir on the other hand consists of around 24 choristers all of whom have trained voices, and many of whom are semi-professional, and who have sung together for many years….new members do join, but there is a strong core with an average tenure of 12 years or more.
The sound produced by such a group has a cohesion that is difficult to match by a large choir. This results in a closer blend of voices and a vocal and musical agility which enables the conductor to have an almost unlimited choice of musical interpretation. A young conductor once described the responsiveness from the choir as being like driving a Ferrari!
The tone and pitch is highly likely to be uniform and accurate, and a small but highly trained ensemble can produce extraordinary passages of very quiet and emotive sound together with a full robust sound.
The SCC was formed in 1975 – what have been the biggest developments over four decades?
The choir was originally a small group of music students at Sydney University who asked one of their tutors, Nicholas Routley, if he would direct and conduct them in a small vocal ensemble.
The biggest developments since then include:
- The evolution from a student choir to a highly established adult choir of highly trained choristers – with students in the group too!
- Under Nicholas Routley, the choir developed an intimate understanding of early Renaissance repertoire, and to a large extent introduced the music of composers like Josquin, Ockeghem and Dufay to Australian audiences.
- Whilst there was perhaps an early Renaissance “core”, the choir also began to champion modern Australian choral composers and now has over 60 commissions with resulting world premieres to its name.
- In recent years, under the baton of our second Musical Director, Paul Stanhope (2005 – 2015), the choir was led into a very diverse range of musical collaborations with a broad array of performers, from oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros to percussion groups to period-instrument ensembles; and we have engaged and performed with many of Australia’s leading soloists.
- In the early years, with the strong Sydney University connection, most concerts were held in the Great Hall with an audience capacity of around 400. More recently Sydney Chamber Choir has filled the City Recital Hall, Angel Place with an audience of 1100.
- For many years the choir was supported in commissioning new Australian works and performing rarely heard repertoire from the rest of the world by grants from Arts NSW and the Australia Council. In recent years state and federal funding has all but disappeared, so the choir now has an established and growing base of supporter philanthropists filling the grant void.
Similarly, how has Australian Choral music developed in that time?
It’s been wonderful to see other choirs also getting excited by new Australian music, so that there is now a pretty sizeable repertoire of Australian choral works, and growing all the time. What we have now is a really broad range of styles and musical languages across multiple generations, from the more established composers like Ross Edwards and Nigel Butterley and Stephen Leek, through to younger voices like Lachlan Skipworth, Dan Walker and Josie Gibson. It’s great to be able to work with emerging composers and see them really blossoming. It’s also wonderful that there are starting to be more opportunities now for new works to get second and third performances, and so become a regular part of the repertoire. Hopefully this will happen more and more.
What reception did the ensemble receive during the South-East Asian tour in 2013?
The highlight of the tour was singing to a full house at the Taiwan National Concert Hall in Taipei. The enthusiasm of the audience was an absolute joy, as was the wonderfully warm welcome we received from our hosts, the Taipei Male Voice Choir, who with generous support from the Taiwan government were able to provide all our internal accommodation and travel, as well as local area marketing to ensure audiences were sizeable, informed and receptive.
We included repertoire from the early Renaissance to 21st century Australia, but received the loudest applause when we sang traditional and contemporary Chinese choral music in Mandarin. The same reaction occurred in Northern Spain when we sang in Basque to Basque audiences – a real point of connection, and a lesson to us all that there is a lot more wonderful music to be discovered when we step outside our comfort zone!
What are the difficulties in performing repertoire written by pre-Baroque composers?
There are always questions to be asked, with music of any period, even up to the 19th and early 20th century, as to how it would have sounded when it was written. But the questions multiply when looking at the music of the medieval era, when musical notation was in its infancy, and was really just a sort of ‘cheat sheet’ to remind the singers of music they had already learned by rote. It gives us the pitches, but tells us little or nothing about the rhythms or the speed or the style, because everyone already knew how it went! Scholars have uncovered hints and clues from ancient treatises but until they invent a time machine, we’ll probably never know exactly how it was intended to sound.