Sydney Philharmonia Choirs Reveals 2025 Concert Season

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs has announced its 2025 Concert Season, a jubilant celebration of the joy of music making and the unifying power of the human voice. This vibrant and adventurous program draws on works from a rich array of luminaries – past and present – highlighting music that questions the world that we live in; and honours and underscores the common threads that bind.

From timeless masterpieces by Bach, Brahms and Rossini, to acclaimed compositions from some of the most admired contemporary voices of today, including Grammy Award winners Christopher Tin and Eric Whitacre, Australians Sarah Hopkins, Nardi Simpson, Joseph Twist and Alice Chance and British composers Joanna Marsh and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, there’s something for everyone in this inspirational season of music, brought to life by Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ acclaimed ensembles.

The season opens in April with a resplendent celebration of the grand pageantry of choral music, set to transport Sydney Opera House Concert Hall audiences to St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey. A divine program of hymns and anthems drawn from the English cathedral tradition, I Was Glad: Cathedral Classics sees Artistic and Music Director Brett Weymark lead the Choirs’ 140-voice Symphony Chorus, with special guest organist David Drury bringing the formidable Sydney Opera House Grand Organ – the world’s largest mechanical action organ – to life.

Lovers of Bach can look forward to a very rare treat at Easter with the Australian premiere performance of Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn’s 1841 interpretation of the St Matthew Passion. Associate Music Director Elizabeth Scott conducts the Choirs and a brilliant cast of soloists, including acclaimed baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Christus. And in a first-ever artistic collaboration, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra will play on actual Romantic-era instruments, led from the violin by co-artistic director Rachel Beesley. Hear this work just as Mendelssohn himself would have heard it.

In May the Choirs visit the city of light, to explore two sides of Rossini in Paris. In this beautiful concert, they pair Act I from the Italian maestro’s ultimate opera, William Tell, created at the height of his career in 1829 for the Paris Opera; with a rare performance of one of his final works, the ironically expansive and joyous Petite messe solennelle – Little Solemn Mass – written 25 years later. Listen out for a very familiar overture during the William Tell.

Be sure to book early for ChorusOz 2025 with its central work, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ magnificent A Sea Symphony, inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman. ChorusOz – the Choirs’ annual “big sing” – attracts up to 1,000 singers from around Australia and overseas, who come together at the Sydney Opera House over the June long weekend for an intensive couple of days of music making culminating in a Sunday afternoon performance. With so many singers it’s almost a full house before the first note! 

A highlight of the year for many will be the highly anticipated Australian June premiere of Eric Whitacre’s Eternity in an Hour, a shimmering hour-long meditation-in-sound inspired by the poetry of the visionary William Blake, with Whitacre returning to Sydney to take the podium and simultaneously mix electronic synthesisers – the latest addition to his mesmerising ethereal soundscapes.

Or in August, the pairing of fellow American Christopher Tin’s The Lost Birds, an elegy for bird species that have been driven to extinction, with Joseph Twist’s Australian song cycle, Timeless Land; two highlights of a powerful program inspired by the natural world, presented at White Bay Power Station.

In 2021 Sydney Philharmonia Choirs Artistic & Music Director, Brett Weymark, conducted the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and a massive choir in a deeply affecting season of Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time for the Adelaide Festival, and is thrilled to present this work in Sydney in September 2025. Written in response to the Nazi’s infamous Kristallnacht of 1938, this modern classic, with its inspired use of Afro-American spirituals, endures as a universal statement about social injustice, conflict, persecution and ways of healing, as relevant now as it was when it was written during World War II.

Answering the above, in October the Choirs present a tender presentation of Brahms’s most loved composition, his consoling German Requiem. Written following the death of his mother in 1865, it’s recognised as an incredibly heartfelt work, renowned for lyrics that read as words of consolation and music rich with the purity of emotion. For this concert, Brett Weymark will conduct the 400-voice Festival Chorus and the talented young musicians of The Sydney Youth Orchestra.

To end the year when Sydney Philharmonia Choirs presents two very distinct Christmas concert programs:

For lovers of tradition, there’s Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Parts 4, 5 and 6; the final three ‘episodes’ of the composer’s monumental oratorio for the Yuletide season. Highly anticipated by audiences who enjoyed Parts 1- 3 in 2023, newcomers should rest reassured they will catch on and be hooked by this heavenly uplifting music.

And for fun-loving folks of all ages, Carols at the House, a festive program of Christmas favourites and unexpected delights, with plenty of audience participation. Hosted and conducted by Brett Weymark at his playful best, it’s set to be talked about as one of Sydney Opera House’s most rambunctious concerts yet, and an exceptional way to end the year on a high note (or two).

As one of Australia’s leading arts organisations, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs is proud of its commissioning program – representative of a longstanding commitment to facilitating world-class opportunities for the promotion of Australian voices at the highest level. Each year their Concert Season is peppered with world-first performances of new works from homegrown composers who have all benefitted from the opportunity to work with the Choirs virtuosic singers.

In 2025 audiences will be treated to the premiere of new Australian compositions from Nardi Simpson, Joseph Twist and Alice Chance, and – in an exciting new development - the two winners of the inaugural Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Emerging Composer Awards (to be announced in March), whose works will premiere as part of the Bach’s Christmas Oratorio program.

The coming year also sees the Choirs’ take their commissioning commitment to a new level with the premiere of two internationally co-commissioned works: Eric Whitacre’s Eternity in an Hour, proudly co-commissioned by the 2024 BBC Proms, Netherlands Radio Choir and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs; and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s A Season to Sing, a choral transformation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with words by Emily Brontë, co-commissioned by Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in collaboration with 54 other choirs worldwide.

In announcing the Choirs 2025 Season Brett Weymark shared that, “Ella Fitzgerald once remarked that the only thing better than singing is more singing – a sentiment we hold very dear to our hearts here at Sydney Philharmonia Choirs…. We believe the best way to experience [music] is not via a screen or through headphones – but in the flesh. The awesome power of the human voice is what connects us all.  We look forward to sharing our joy and passion with you in 2025”.

To post a comment, you must register and login.