Music / Colours of Earth, The Oriana Chorale. At Wesley Uniting Church, December 6. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

It is wonderfully refreshing to attend a vocal concert in December with absolutely no acknowledgement that Christmas is but a few weeks away.

Oriana’s final performance of the year was instead themed around rocks and earth and such things. It was presented  in partnership with the Canberra Lapidary Club who displayed various rocks and minerals which were referenced in the music performed.

They sang four works, three by Australian composers, in an hour-long concert of remarkable intensity. All four were full of big harmonic structures, complex chords and shifting rhythms which challenged the choir occasionally. The choir was joined by percussionists Veronica Bailey and Louis Sharpe who added another layer to the sound

The first work was Desert Sea by Luke Byrne. The text describes Kati Thanda/Lake Eyre in three verses compiled from the writings of explorer Charles Sturt. The music is big, with a lot going on, including a bridging section between the middle last verses utilising bird calls which were gradually subsumed by wordless music.

The second work was Lost Leaves by Aija Draguns, Oriana’s Emerging Composer in Residence this year. This is a most admirable program to give a choral composer starting out the opportunity to work with the choir. It included some attractive melodic ideas and finished with a great last chord.

The major work of the concert was Ochre by American composer Caroline Shaw. This piece is in seven sections, all named after particular minerals and can only be described as stunning. The program notes mention that Shaw sees/hears choral voices as “the original synthesiser” and Oriana musical director Dan Walker talked about the choir as an instrument in his introduction.

This was music which could only be performed by a choir, using the timbres and tonalities of human voices. It could possibly be recreated with a bank of carefully programmed electronic synthesisers, but why would you bother?

Each of the seven sections was distinctly different. A couple were just wordless sounds, the others fragmentary texts with some hint of minerality but which mostly were there as carriers of particular vocal effects. This was a memorable musical triumph for Walker and the choir.

The concert finished with a setting by Dan Walker of a Judith Wright poem To a Child. This was in three sections, again with dense and complex harmonies, but resolved very nicely to finish a very satisfying concert.