REQUIEM

Conductor: David Mackay

Orchestra leader: Barbara Jane Gilby

3:00pm, Sunday 14 July 2024

Wesley Uniting Church, Forrest

In adding complications to an automatic watch, watchmakers not only demonstrate their technical skill, but enhance the appearance and capability of the finished product. The most accomplished horologists are those who are able to combine intricately detailed mechanisms with great beauty, ensuring that technical complexity is always in service of aesthetics. Our upcoming programme features works by composers who take the same approach to music—in which there is always more under the surface than might be immediately apparent, but whose complexity is always in service of great beauty.

Featuring two premiere performances and culminating in Fauré’s ethereal Requiem, Coro’s winter concert promises an afternoon of inspiration and solace that is not to be missed.

Program

Maurice Duruflé – Motets

Nicholas Michael Smith - Salve Regina (premiere)

David Mackay - The Country of Marriage (premiere)

James Yorkston - Molly Malone (arr. Aue ed. Mackay)

Olivier Messiaen - O Sacrum Convivium

Erik Satie (arr. Gilby) - Gymnopédies

Gabriel Fauré – Requiem

TICKETS

$60 Full price

$50 Seniors Card holders

$45 Concession

Nicholas Smith Salve Regina - Australian premiere performance (composed 2020)

I was looking to write something with no extreme ranges and moving mostly by step. I was casting about for a prayer that was perhaps favoured at one time in greater China, but there is no information on that. Liturgy very standardized! Then this text was suggested to me just at the right moment.

In the foreground of my thinking: all those people here with belief in the system that has once again trashed them. Hope; unrequited. And in the background of my thinking: all those people fleeing war and unrest towards a Europe that seems to promise hope, dignity and compassion but, at a political level, will not deliver. I suppose this feeds into the bush fire situation where you are too. Unresolved resolution. Stable instability.

For over 30 years, celebrated British musician Nicholas Michael Smith OBE has introduced Chinese audiences to major orchestral and choral works from the western classical canon and raised the profile of Chinese music abroad. Find out more…