The music of Giovanni Gabrieli, Antonio Caldara, Domenico Scarlatti and Claudio Monteverdi will be on show at Snow Concert Hall soon in a rare visit from Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.

The choirs celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2020 in the midst of covid, by commissioning 100 Minutes of New Australian Music – featuring compositions by Elena Kats-Chernin, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and Brett Dean.

A resident company of the Sydney Opera House, they are led by Brett Weymark, artistic and music director since 2003 and very familiar to Canberra audiences from having conducted several operas for Tobias Cole’s Handel in the Theatre company. 

Now Weymark is bringing 40 singers from the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Chamber Singers and a tight ensemble of Baroque musicians to the Snow Concert Hall, to perform a program of what he calls “the greatest architectural music of all time”.

The architectural reference is to Rome’s chapels and the balconies overlooking Venice’s Piazza San Marco.

The chamber singers specialise in choral repertoire from the Renaissance to the 21st century.

They regularly perform with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, have premiered Australian music by Canberra’s Dan Walker and in 2016 recorded and released This Secret World, the music of Dan Walker.

The singers will sometimes work in four parts and at other times in up to 16 parts and Weymark can hardly suppress the excitement as he describes a concert full of “elaborate and highly detailed music, alive with drama and passion”. 

They haven’t been to Canberra for 10 years and are collectively thrilled, he says, to explore the new concert hall, the acoustic of which they have not yet heard, but will soon test in a concert that highlights “the intricacies and flexibility of the human voice in its purest form”.

The music, Weymark tells me, is “utterly beautiful” and covers an extraordinary century of sustained musical growth from roughly 1600 to the 1750, traditionally the close of the Baroque.

This is a professional choir at the height of its powers, with the youngest chorister 21 and the oldest in his 70s. They run a wide gamut of musical styles but have, he says, been chosen for purity of voice. Sopranos are the purest, then come tenors, with the basses producing a fuller sound. 

The search for purity accounts for the preference for boy sopranos and also for the fame of the castrati. The idea, he says, was to maintain that boyish purity of sound and add the lung capacity and power.

As for the idea of architectural music, it reached the time of Gabrieli, who in his many years at the Basilica of San Marco, created sculptural surround-sounds and antiphonal effects with his choristers standing in the organ loft or around balconies, with instruments added.

Monteverdi got the same job after Gabrieli and put architectural sounds to practice too, adding the element of word-painting in his exquisite music. 

A highlight for Weymark will be the performance of Domenico Scarlatti’s rarely performed Stabat Mater as arranged for 10 individual voices.

It runs for 20-25 minutes and its point, he says, is to make the audience feel the suffering of Mary, while also moving the hearts of the listeners. 

Voices of the Italian Baroque, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Snow Concert Hall, August 24.