There was a second choral concert at Wesley and I stayed on to record that one too. This was The Australian Voices, a very professional and young outfit singing original Australian compositions with very much creativity and originality. I wrote of CCS earlier as the Sound of voice, as the voice as the most human of instruments. I'm not sure I agree after this concert, hearing voices sounding as cockatoo shrills, Aboriginal motifs, wind and water and birdlife. Maybe this is Voice as colour or presence. Whatever, it was fabulously professional, this Queensland choir touring through Canberra for the day, with lighting and AV and memorised music and unaccompanied. The whole was enthusiastically conducted and introduced by John Rotar, who also provided several compositions, by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and others, on themes of Uluru, creation stories, climate requiems, valleys and circuses, with an absolutely entertaining and apt and very creative take on Waltzing Matilda to end the show with a considerable glee. But I loved especially to watch the singers performing birdsong or other, obviously serious in their renditions and still enjoying the whole. (Maybe like me, when I sing a stilted song to our bemused local magpies. It's much recommended: they may look confused but they never swoop.) Suffice to say there were some superb voices here and we heard them also in solo, for song as well as rendition, with fascinating modern Australian composition of great relevance to our present-day wide brown land. CCS may have been the Sound of Voice but maybe TAV were the Voice of Sound, but together they presented a most effective array of modern Australian choral music for a lucky audience over one afternoon at Wesley. PS, excuse the photo which was taken in warmup: the best I could manage given lighting.
The Australian Voices performed unaccompanied on tour at Wesley under John Rotar (conductor, MD).
