Paul Stanhope: A New Requiem

Award-winning composer and former Sydney Chamber Choir Music Director Paul Stanhope returns to lead the choir in the world premiere performance of his Requiem, the centrepiece of a program exploring themes of mortality, hope, ritual and commemoration.

The concert program is a conversation between old and new, featuring the sumptuous Spanish Renaissance polyphony of Tomás Luis de Victoria, with the contemporary Australian voices of Mary Finsterer and Indigenous composer Brenda Gifford. James MacMillan's Miserere is a choral tour de force, taking up dual notions of solemnity and virtuosity.

Paul Stanhope’s Requiem is a major new work of transcendent beauty and healing that brings together settings of the Latin Mass for the Dead with poetry by Emily Dickinson, Mary Elizabeth Frye and Oodgeroo Noonuccal. The choir will be joined by soprano Chloe Lankshear, tenor Richard Butler, harpist Emily Granger, percussionist Jess Ciampa and wind players from the Sydney Symphony Fellows.