Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
8pm, Friday 28 February 2014, Cathedral of St Paul, Wellington
Reviewed by William Dart, NZ Herald

There was an air of ritual about Requiem for the Fallen, the major music commission of the New Zealand Arts Festival.

It all took place on a raised stage in Wellington’s Cathedral of St Paul, with audience on either side, which worked well for some shorter choral items from Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, under Karen Grylls.

The ethereal textures of Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord gained poignancy with its shivery dissonances aloft in the building’s resonant acoustics.

Schnittke’s Drei Geistlicher Gesange had the singers moving from a circle formation to two opposing groups, delivering the piece’s almost primal passion with real fervour.

The New Zealand String Quartet contributed the central movement of Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet. There was a hushed gravity to its song of thanksgiving, although the venue was not so kind to the floating scales of its andante sections.

Ross Harris and Vincent O’Sullivan’s Requiem for the Fallen was the key offering of the evening, acknowledging the centenary of World War I with a thoughtful mix of formal and personal, Latin liturgical texts blending effectively with O’Sullivan’s pithy verses.

Bringing together string quartet, choir and the taonga puoro of Horomona Horo, the innate drama of this score did not always need the sometimes distracting to-and-fro that director Jonathan Alver had imposed.

Horo’s exquisitely gauged improvisations ranged from a crystalline koauau introduction to a war-like pukaea in the Dies Irae, that evoked the horrors of hell itself, in tandem with Harris himself on thunderous bass drum.

Voices NZ and Grylls are a potent team and there was pride of ownership in their handling of Harris’ immaculately crafted score. The arching phrases of In Paradisum seemed to leap to heaven itself and, early on, tenor Lachlan Craig eloquently delivered the all-important lines, “He is one of us. His is one of our own.”

William Dart

A year ago we challenged ourselves to keep singing at a world-class level, as expected from Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, but in a way that is more locally focused when borders and alert levels keep us at home.

We’re excited now to debut our regional ensembles! With funding from Creative NZ’s resilience fund, we’re now rolling out the project in Wellington and Auckland.

Read more here

The Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand Trust governs three national choirs with great domestic and international reputations – NZ Secondary Students’ Choir https://www.nzsschoir.com/, NZ Youth Choir https://www.nzyouthchoir.com/ and Voices NZ https://www.voicesnz.com/. The associated Choirs Aotearoa Foundation Trust manages an endowment fund to provide long term financial support to the charitable activities of the Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand Trust.

We are looking for new Trustees with specific skills for the Choirs Aotearoa Foundation Trust.

The Foundation has been well established with a simple structure and a modest investment base. We are looking for people to help take things forward with new ideas on how we might grow the fund to provide for the long term security of the choirs as well as providing the support to enable broad access and participation in our national choirs. We may also be looking for someone to chair the Foundation Trust in the future.

We are looking for skills in the areas of investment management, marketing and/or communications and community networks to oversee and grow the current invested funds, through bequests and donations.

We’d love to hear from you and invite you to send your governance CV to canztrustees@gmail.com by 18 June 2021.

If you have questions you can contact the current CANZ Chair at canztrustees@gmail.com.

Taonga Moana is heading to the mainland, the Festival of Colour in Wanaka for a one-night only concert on 14 April.

“For Voices New Zealand, Taonga Moana represents a significant moment in their performing career. When I founded the choir in 1998, the aspiration was to create a Chamber Choir on a professional level, to be visible alongside our national orchestra, national ballet and national opera company. The hope was also that such an ensemble would be something young singers could aspire to for a professional life in ensemble singing. This remains so…It is with great humility and pleasure that I invite you to share the journey of the kuaka with us…” – Karen Grylls, Artistic Director & Conductor

Read more here

Voices Ensembles is a new project offering an exciting opportunity for professional singers in Aotearoa New Zealand to work and perform at a high artistic level. Choirs Aotearoa has received funding from Creative New Zealand to run a pilot scheme that creates small vocal ensembles of Voices NZ singers. The pilot is artistically led by Karen Grylls and Christopher Bruerton (current member of The King’s Singers) and will run from March to October 2021.

Auditions will be held 19 and 26 February.

Check out this additional information and how to apply.

A few weeks out from our brand new reimagining of early music When Light Breaks, we take a look at one person bringing the story to life. We’re excited to be working with Director Jacqueline Coats who has many feathers in her cap. She has worked as a director and an assistant director for the NZ International Festival of the Arts, NZ Opera, Victorian Opera in Melbourne, CubaDupa in Wellington and many more. She has won accolades from the NZ Fringe and the Wellington Theatre Awards, and in 2014 was ‘Director of the Year’ at the Dunedin Theatre Awards for her premiere of Anthony Richie’s This Other Eden.

Jacqueline has a passion for theatre and opera for young people. She has worked as an actor, a music director and a stage director for Capital E National Theatre for Children, most recently directing their touring production of Songs of the Sea. Jacqueline’s theatre credits include the original touring productions of Lines from the Nile and Home; a promenade production of Martin Sherman’s Bent; and co-directing two shows for Wellington Summer Shakespeare. She directed Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona for Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School at the end of 2018.

Jacqueline is not only directing When Light Breaks, but she has crafted the journey of the show, inspired by the quote “we are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.” The concert is set around the ritual of grief, moving through five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, moving from darkness to light over the course of the performance.

The journey of the concert will be guided by puppetry from Little Dog Barking Theatre Company, a first for a Voices New Zealand concert.

Composing for a large choir and a maximum of three instruments – that’s the challenge Choirs Aotearoa NZ is issuing to some adventurous Kiwi composers.

It’s a perfect time for composers to try something new.   Concert plans are in disarray, thanks to the pandemic.  And they’re likely to continue to face disruptions for the foreseeable future.

This is New Zealand’s first national competition specifically for choral song-writing – Compose Aotearoa.

Read more on RNZ

We are head over heels with opera, wide eyed for Monteverdi and smitten for Britten. With the alert levels changing for the better, we can confirm that VOICES LOVE OPERA is coming to your stages in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington mid-October. Some of New Zealand’s best singers are debuting a new show that explores both the triumphs and the heartbreaks of love.

Read more here

I am genuinely excited to share our 2022 season with you all. These concerts showcase the magnificence of two monumental requiem settings by Verdi and Mozart, The Sacred Veil, composed and conducted by Eric Whitacre, a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana performed by our three national choirs, and a production for sixteen Voices New Zealand singers, Voices Love Opera, staged by the award-winning opera and theatre director, Jacqueline Coates.

Such collaborations as this season offers give us the point of difference as national choirs. The opportunity to work with the NZSO and their newly appointed Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor, Gemma New, to perform Mozart’s Requiem and with the APO and Music Director, Giordano Bellincampi, for a once in a lifetime opportunity to perform Verdi’s Requiem are priceless opportunities for our singers and audiences alike.

The versatility and panache of Voices New Zealand singers is captured in Jacqui’s staging for Voices Love Opera. The show is one of the funniest and most engaging we have presented and I’m very proud of the ensemble singers and the professional soloists who bring the stories of the lovers and their various successes (or otherwise) to life. The excerpt from Nico Muhly’s The Two Boys exposes the horrors of relationships in chat rooms and gives the show a particularly contemporary and poignant twist.

Most significant for 2022 are the opportunities for our national choirs viz. Voices New Zealand, New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir, and New Zealand Youth Choir to perform together. First, the opportunity to present two recitals conducted by Grammy award-winning American choral composer, Eric Whitacre, will give the choirs and the listeners the opportunity to hear the first New Zealand performance of The Sacred Veil, a profound meditation on love, life, and loss. Then all three choirs join, together with alumni soloists Natasha Wilson (soprano), Oliver Sewell (tenor) and James Harrison (baritone), in the dramatic and intense work by Carl Orff, Carmina Burana which I will conduct in Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Can’t wait to share this with you all. See you at the concerts!

Karen Grylls ONZM
Artistic Director

My inspiration for the May and October concerts, especially, comes from the whakataukī  (Māori proverb) Ka mua ka muri  (walking backwards into the future) where the past and the future intertwine, where those in the present stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, where our composers carry ideas from early music and classical composers into their new kupu and new works. This inclusion of works from the choral canon into the newly commissioned works has always been a clear path for composers and choirs.

At the May Concert, Early Music Reimagined, you will hear Leonie Holmes’s new work Der Weg alongside Bach’s double choir motet Komm, Jesu, komm BWV 229.This concert will feature Eric Renick (marimba, percussion) and James Bush (violoncello), directed by Jacqui Coates, and will present new views of old music and new compositions connected to these works. Expect the unexpected!

The theme continues with the October Concert Mozart Re-imagined, a new work commissioned by Chamber Music NZ from our very own NZ composer, Robert Wiremu. This will be an exciting opportunity for Robert to write a work for 18 voices and instrumental ensemble, with his relevant and contemporary view which references Mozart’s Requiem.

The orchestral collaborations give us the chance to perform Beethoven 9 with the Auckland Philharmonia and Mahler 3 with NZSO featuring an upper voice choir and a children’s choir.

This is indeed an exciting year for us all. See you at the concerts!

Karen Grylls ONZM

Music Director, Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir

Artistic Director, Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand