Riversong, a gala fundraising concert at the National Museum, will be performed by Canberra choral group The Resonants, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA. 

For 17 years, the Australian River Restoration Centre has been working to secure the future of the country’s rivers and now, in an imaginative leap into the world of performance, it’s getting behind a gala fundraising concert at the National Museum.

The concert, Riversong, will be performed by Canberra choral group, The Resonants, preceded by a water-networking event in the museum’s Gandel Atrium.

It’s all the brainchild of the centre’s director, Siwan Lovett, who is, by no coincidence at all, a member of the choir.

The idea is to expand, through ticket sales, donations and a silent auction, the centre’s advocacy and on-ground action and to seize opportunities that may fall outside the scope of traditional grants.

Rivers and music go well together, as evinced by the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2024 production, River, which saw music performed to moving imagery by Jennifer Peedom, voiced by US actor Willem Dafoe.

Riverdance will differ, with original Canberra music offerings and well-known local presenter Alex Sloan introducing the ideas and the songs to be performed. 

The Resonants are among the real stayers in the Canberra musical scene. 

Founded by respected voice teacher, singer and conductor Helen Swan during 1990, it features around 30 adult voices, mostly singing unaccompanied (a cappella), though not always.

Swan, who still keeps up a cracking pace leading The Resonants, her own singing business and U3A’s Warrani Chorale, had noticed that there was a gap in singing opportunities for people who had just left school. 

But as the original young professionals and university students grew up, so did the choir, becoming a fixture in the Canberra arts scene and now boasting six strong tenors and six basses, which gives them depth as well as volume.

When I catch up with the choir’s president Allison Tryon, who has been a working member since 1991, I find that the excitement about Riversong is palpable.

Tryon praises Siwan’s brainwave idea of combining music and activism with the Riversong concept, an idea, she reports, that the choir picked up quickly.

They didn’t need much nudging. Over the years they’ve been involved in charity and community work, raising money in the wake of the 2003 Canberra bushfires and for victims of the Asian tsunami in 2004, to name just two causes.

This venture into the natural world is, she says, “kind of about us, but not about us, a lovely arts partnership.”

Filling the capacious Gandel Atrium at the NMA can be a tall order, so the singers will be accompanied by their regular pianist, Emily Leong, and augmented for some numbers with a percussionist and a bassoon player.

All the music will be backed by spectacular still imagery of riverscapes, enhanced by The Resonants’ uniform of sparkling scarves for women and silver ties for men.

The evening will open with The Spheres from Sunrise Mass by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, followed by Down by the Riverside arranged by John Rutter, the spiritual, Deep River, Henry’s Mancini’s Moon River, Let the River Run by Carly Simon and Shenandoah.

Evoking the Australian landscape, they will then sing Three Australian bush songs (Dawn, Birds, and Sunset) by Iain Grandage, Ruth Kilpatrick’s arrangement of Waltzing Matilda, and This is our Home, by Paul Stanhope.

Canberrans are likely to be most interested in what follows: Weather Makers, by Kirsten Duncan, a long-time choir member who originally wrote the piece for A Chorus of Women and The Climate Council of Australia in 2016; and in the world premiere of Whisper of the Dying Stream: a Lament.

The latter piece was written this year by Sophie Van Dijk, an up-and-coming composer whose mum Kylie is one of the choir’s founding members.

The finale will be a big choral piece, Riversong by Andy Beck, which gives the title to the concert and, as Tryon says, will give the audience “something to remember as they leave”.

Riversong, Gandel Atrium, National Museum of Australia, May 17. No door tickets, bookings at riversong.au