Astra Chamber Music (Australia)
Melbourne’s Astra Choir takes choral sound on transformational pathways – from a key contemporary Romanian work, back into musical history and forward to electronic spectra from two of Australia's present-day sonic pioneers.
Performed at one of the city's architectural and acoustic marvels, St Mary Star of the Sea church in West Melbourne, Dolorosa/Gaude! represents two images of the traditional figure of Mary: the grieving victim of human conflict, as portrayed by Romanian Dan Dediu in a stunning harmonic pageant of the medieval poem Stabat mater dolorosa; and the joyful affirmation of Nature as ‘star of the sea’, as laid out in a choral tableau by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.
Australian composer Carl Vine places human singing and laughter in an endangered natural world in his Hebrew psalm setting for choir and organ. Recorder celebrity Genevieve Lacey joins the choir and computer-art composers Steve Stelios Adam and Michael Hewes in music, that moves between the ‘real’ and the transfigured.
Dolorosa/Gaude! is a pilgrimage through the worlds of the sacred, the ritualistic and the natural, in a spirit of sonic experiment and adventure.
Dan Dediu Stabat Mater dolorosa, 10 madrigals after Gesualdo and Verdi
Carl Vine They Shall Laugh and Sing
Anthony Briggs Credo
Steve Stelios Adam Et Døgn – One Day
Steve Stelios Adam Waves
Michael Hewes An Imaginary Hymn (World Premiere)
Einojuhani Rautavaara Song of Mary: Star of the Sea/Gaude!
With choral pieces by Stravinsky, Verdi, Gesualdo and Gombert
Recorders Genevieve Lacey
Organ Rhys Boak
Electronics Steve Stelios Adam and Michael Hewes
The Astra Choir
Conductor John McCaughey
