Music / We Were Not Ready, Music of Loss, of Grief and of Healing, The Oriana Chorale. At Wesley Uniting Church, Forrest, March 21. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

This splendidly compact Oriana Chorale concert pulled together an eclectic range of composers and pieces presented with precision and energy by a band of highly skilled musicians conducted by director Dan Walker. 

Deaths and losses and passage beyond the initial grief figured repeatedly so it was enough that the intense evening ran just over an hour and it was fitting that there be no interval. 

The evening began with English composer Thomas Weelkes’ measured and feeling 17th century setting When David Heard, which might well commemorate the death in 1612 of Henry, Prince of Wales, setting Absalom’s death against that of the immensely promising prince. 

Later a solemn piece of the same name by American composer Eric Whitacre brought that powerful reference back using the same spare and resonant biblical text.

Walker handed over to Olivia Swift to conduct The Soldier’s Grave, her composition based on a poem about an American Civil War soldier’s resting place, a sombre meditation on how little is known about some dead. Not all are the sons of kings. 

She followed that with a moving performance of Paola Prestini’s atmospheric Fratres, which echoes the sounds that might go on in a church immersed in the ceremony of communion and remembrance. 

Walker resumed the podium for the rest of the briskly run evening with Butterfly, a short piece by Finnish composer Mia Makaroff, short and sharp as the life of humans.

It was almost a relief to be settled next into the familiar measured music of Monteverdi’s sestina Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata before moving back to When David Heard, this time in a version by American composer Eric Whitacre, responding strongly and dramatically to the death of a friend’s son. The choir were more than up for the technical challenges of this longish piece.

The death of a grandfather and a Latvian good night song for children inspired and infused Ella Macens’ disturbingly named We Were Not Ready. 

The program was rounded out with Dan Walker’s arrangement of an earthy piece from America’s unaccompanied “sacred harp” tradition, All is Well. In the face of inevitable death what else can really be said?

The Oriana Chorale left us wanting more but knew when less was enough.