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The Choir
In February 2005, the Sydneian Bach Choir embarked on BACH 2010, a musical journey to perform all of Bach’s choral cantatas, in a series of 50 concerts through December 2010. The choir was formed in 2000 as part of the Sydneian Festival Choir, in order to raise money for local charities through fundraising concerts. Although their repertoire is wide and varied, the fifty voice Bach Choir uses the choral music of J.S. Bach as its touchstone. In residence at Sydney Grammar School, the choir performs the closing work of the School’s biennial Bach Festival, including Bach’s St John Passion, Christmas Oratorio and B Minor Mass. They have also performed the music of Schütz, Tavener, Mendelssohn, Whitacre and many others, and gave the Australian premiere of Shostokovich’s Rayok as part of a new music festival at the University of Sydney. Each year, the choir commissions new works from Australian composers, including Anna Jacobs, Richard Charlton and James Humberstone.
In combination with the Sydneian Festival Choir, they have performed several large works for choir and orchestra, including the Brahms Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana and Britten’s Saint Nicolas. The Bach Choir sang Mozart’s Mass in C Minor with the Nova Chamber Orchestra in 2003, and performed the Monteverdi Vespers (1610) in 2004 as part of the Organ Festival inaugurating Sydney Grammar School’s new Mander organ.
In December 2004, the Bach Choir travelled to Venice, where they performed sections of the Monteverdi Vespers at San Marco; to Leipzig, where they performed in Bach’s churches; and to America, where they met with renowned Bach scholar Christoph Wolff of Harvard University. The choir recently joined forces with the choirs of Sydney Grammar School in a programme of Mozart choral music for an SBS Television documentary aired in January 2006. The Bach Choir won the two major choral prizes in the 2006 McDonald’s Performing Arts Challenge.
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