Tag: AWR

  • ANZAC Day 2020

    ** STOP PRESS ** As a result of the hugely positive response, the video of An Australian War Requiem will remain available for a further week, to the end of Sunday May 3rd, the day that we were to have held our first concert of 2020. ** STOP PRESS ** For the first time in…

  • Sing On Report – An Australian War Requiem

    In his insightful analysis of the coup d’etat that brought Louis Napoleon to power in France in 1848, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx famously commented: “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,…

  • Adrian Tamburini – Bass-Baritone Extraordinaire

    In recent years, Adrian Tamburini has become one of the Choir’s favourite soloists. Adrian first sang with us as bass soloist in the premiere of Christopher Bowen’s An Australian War Requiem in August 2014, and returned for Dvořak’s Stabat Mater, von Suppé’s Requiem and, most recently, Haydn’s Die Schöpfung, the brilliant recording of which I…

  • Ten Years of Grads’ Recordings

    This year marks ten years since SUGC began to record its concerts. As the then President, clearly a very wise person, said in reporting to the 2005 AGM: These recordings will serve as important documents for the Choir as an institution and for us individually as singers.  So long as they remain affordable, which requires…

  • Five minutes with…Adrian Tamburini, bass

    One of the bass soloists singing with us at the premiere of ‘An Australian War Requiem’ on 10 August 2014, Adrian Tamburini answers questions about the significance of the event for him. What did you find tempting about the invitation to sing in An Australian War Requiem? I’m a strong believer and supporter of new…

  • Treasured letters: an interview with Pamela Traynor, librettist—part 1

    The libretto for An Australian War Requiem features quotes from letters between soldiers at the front and mothers at home in Australia. It also includes excerpts from poems, and from the sacred hymn of Mary, the Stabat Mater. The libretto was created by Pamela Traynor, who kindly answered questions about research, writing, and the emotional…

  • The board is set…

    (This post also appears on the AWR website.) As we work through our rehearsals for An Australian War Requiem, it’s not surprising that our thoughts turn to members of our own families who went off to war to ‘do their bit’, that we wonder about their lives here at home before war broke out, and…

  • An Australian War Requiem—beginning our journey

    There is something very special about picking up the score of a newly composed work at the start of a rehearsal period; of leafing through the pages and ever-so-slightly stumbling over unfamiliar words, fumbling through initially alien harmonies. The contents between the clean black covers is a mystery. For this work we have nothing to…

  • An Australian War Requiem – meditating on conflict and loss

    August 2014 marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1—the ‘war to end all wars’—a conflict which saw Australia first fight under its own flag, lose 60,000 to death and more than a hundred thousand to injury, and which helped define its fledgling sense of nationhood. But amongst the historic discussion of military…