Innocence & Experience

Sydney Chamber Choir has drawn on almost five decades of concerts in Innocence & Experience to select landmark gems of Australian and Renaissance music for two special degustation performances at the new ACO’s recital hall, The Neilson, in Walsh Bay.

Innocence & Experience teams the exquisite beauty of Renaissance masters like Josquin des Prez, Ockeghem and Dufay, whose music the choir has brought to Australian audiences since 1975, with the best of the passionate, inspiring Australian work which it has premiered or commissioned in later decades.

Highlights include Ross Edwards’ two famous, contrasting Flower Songs, one joyous, the other, meditative; Josie Gibson’s powerful choral plea for refugees, dedicated to the Choir’s former artistic drector Richard Gill and a new work, by rising star Ella Macens, urging us to see the good in people.

“The title, I borrowed from William Blake’s poem,” says conductor Sam Allchurch. “Like so many seeming polarities, the lesson of life teaches us both are valuable – innocence and experience together. Similarly, the choir from early days was a forerunner in reviving ancient music, as well as in developing an Australian choral repertory. And we celebrate our role in constantly revisiting new works, great works, and reworking them with new audiences. Today choral music in Australia, and our own singers, lead the way when it comes to new music.”

The concert also reworks a moving recent commission from SCC chorister Dan Walker set to a poem about living in two worlds by the late indigenous activist Alice Eather from Arnhem Land; and another selected from Joe Twist’s celebrated Australian Song Cycle premiered last year.

Brenda Gifford’s Mother Earth/Minga Bagan returns, now as the customary indigenous welcome to the concert, which also features Stephen Adams’ acclaimed Memory Pieces, premiered by the choir in 1995. For this, the 30 choristers of the Sydney Chamber Choir will be joined by percussionist Jess Ciampa and Joshua Hill.