A most luxurious, splendidly performed concert by the Song Company filmed at the City Recital Hall Sydney and also streamed by the Australian Digital Concert Hall.

First we heard a thrilling performance of Thomas Tallis’s “Sancte Deus” – starkly dramatic, with voices soaring, flowing and rippling, followed without pause into Marc’Antonio Ingegneri’s “Tenebrae factae sunt.” Both were many layered and highly structured, with thunderous flourishes of voices  at other times haunting and pleading,

Antony Pitts,  Artistic Director,  then took to the stage and mentioned that the concert was partly in memoriam of Australian composer Nigel Butterley, who had passed away that day,  but that it was also dedicated to “those we have loved and lost” during the pandemic. Pitts also acknowledged the twelve new apprentices on stage with the Company for the first time. We were then asked by Pitts to imagine ourselves in the “intimacy of a 19th-century salon” for the rest of the concert: two works by Brahms, finishing with the German Requiem.

We then heard esteemed pianist Gerard Willems and The Song Company’s Associate Artistic Director Francis Greep play the lush, highly structured, four-handed version of the “Variations on a Theme of Haydn” (St Anthony Variations), which he wrote in tandem with the orchestral version. The music is divided into two sections : the first half introduces the main melody which is then repeated , a different theme opens the second half before again establishing the main theme and finishing with a coda, before repeating the second half of the theme – which took us to interval.

We were then asked by Pitts to imagine ourselves in the “intimacy of a 19th-century salon” for the rest of the concert: two works by Brahms, finishing with the German Requiem.

A passionate, sonorous, pleading solo by bass baritone Tasmanian-born Christopher Richardson followed in the third part, ‘Lord let me know mine end’. Soprano Amy Moore, now a Company stalwart, was lustrous in her solo ‘Ye now have sorrow’- her precise diction, exemplary intonation and velvety tone, made this reassuring aria an accomplished, luminous feature. Not forgetting Moore and Chloe Lankshear’s duet at the start of the final movement. There was jumpy, spiky piano and Company voices that then bubbled and tumbled, some voices temporarily spotlit, which took us to the entwined, multifaceted conclusion of this delectable concert.

Running time 1 hour 48 minutes including one interval

Brahm’s Requiem by the Song Company was streamed by the Australian Digital Concert Hall on 2 March 2022
Running time 1 hour 48 minutes including one interval

Featured image : The Song Company. Pic Christopher Hayles Photography