A newly commissioned Requiem by Gordon Kerry takes the form of a series of interpolations between an exquisite array of Renaissance choral music, both sacred and secular. Gordon Kerry explains that, in writing his Requiem, he wanted to compose something in line, in terms of mood and scale, with the Renaissance music in which the Australian Chamber Choir excels.

One of those sacred pieces, ‘I am the lilly of the filed’, receives its Australian premiere in this concert. When Raffaella Aleotti published this as part of her ‘Sacred Songs’ in Venice in 1593, she became the first female composer to publish a collection of sacred music.

John Dowland, representing the secular on this program with his ‘Weep you no more sad fountains’, was the equivalent of today’s singer/songwriter, setting his own poetry, and performing to his own accompaniment on the lute.

Morten Lauridsen’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ occupies a similar space in our time as Dowland’s madrigals did during the Renaissance. Lauridsen’s ethereal harmonies can set off a powerful emotional response, so that his meditative and introverted music has achieved a genre-defying position of popularity.