PHOTO
The Southern Youth Choir will celebrate a busy and successful year of music-making with a wide-ranging concert this weekend.
Titled “Rejoice!”, the concert will be held this Saturday night, from 7.30pm at St Paul’s Cathedral, conducted by John Buchanan and student conductors Tessa Campbell and Ewen Clarke-Wallace.
Selected by Buchanan and choir members themselves, the concert programme will range from full choral cantata to renditions of pop songs.
Buchanan said the concert’s featured and concluding work would be Benjamin Britten’s festival cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, performed to mark the composer’s death 50 years ago and celebrate his musical legacy.
Buchanan will conduct with Dunedin City Organist David Burchell accompanying on the organ, and choir members as soloists.
The anniversaries of two other composers — Charles Wood, who died 100 years ago; and Gerald Finzi, who died 70 years ago — will also be commemorated with performances of their work.
The 55-strong Southern Youth Choir will also sing Christopher Tin’s Grammy award-winning Baba Yetu, along with works by Hoagy Carmichael, Kirby Shaw, Michael Tippet and Joni Mitchell.
Buchanan said the Southern Youth Choir was going from strength to strength, and had welcomed some new members from local high schools. Many of the singers are studying at the University of Otago.
“The choir is really singing well and making a lovely sound, so we are in for a very good concert,” he said.