Transcendence

Sjaella is is performing in Transcendence - 7 July | Meridians - 8 July

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Their shared roots reach back to an age when emotions can flow unhindered. They have strong connections and limitless enjoyment. Sjaella is the soul of the women who appear together on stage and have not lost a child-like experience of the world. Community feeds on play and individual strength. There is movement, language, noise and sound, with bodies, focus, and shared breath. It is all of this that Sjaella experiences and seeks to share.

The voyage of discovery began for these artists in 2005, and it has now taken them around the world. Sjaella has been a fixture on the universal vocal music scene for years, performing concerts at renowned festivals, and winning first prize at many competitions. The ensemble has recently been on concert tours to South Africa, Belgium, Spain, and Norway.

Every journey, every encounter with international artists opens new doors for Sjaella, behind which musical spaces and worlds of ideas are revealed. These six young women see it as their task to rethink what seems well-known, to find new sounds, and to bring everything into an artistic context. The album Origins, released on Outhere Music in 2021, is like life itself: a cycle consisting of many smaller ones, connected in a way that can only be seen when appreciated as a whole.
Image credit: Lutz Weichmann

The Australian Voices is performing in 30 Years of The Australian Voices - 5 July | Transcendence - 7 July | Meridians - 8 July | The Grand Finale Concert - 9 July

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From its inception in 1993, The Australian Voices (TAV) has relentlessly pursued its mission to commission, perform and promote Australian music, both locally and internationally.

The vision of Graeme Morton and Stephen Leek when founding the group was to tap into something unique about Australia, its land and its people.

Through the music of a new generation of Australian composers, including the original musical language of Stephen Leek, TAV created a sound unlike anything the world had heard before. In 2009 Gordon Hamilton took the reins, and with works like "Toy Story 3 = Awesome!"  and Robert Davidson's acclaimed  "Not Now, Not Ever!" a musicalisation of Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny’ speech, brought the group firmly into the 21st century and again at the forefront of Australian, and international choral music.

Recently, the choir has collaborated with numerous Australian musicians and ensembles: in 2019, the choir performed Britten’s Cantata Misericordium and a ‘re-composition’ of Mozart’s Requiem by then-Artistic Director Gordon Hamilton in collaboration with Omega Ensemble; in 2022, collaborated with ARIA-nominated artist Raphael Karlen and Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra to premiere Sinking Cities, a work for string orchestra, choir, and saxophone; and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the choir commissioned 22 (mostly) Australian composers to write a choral work on the theme “Far and Near”, in response to the darkening of concert halls around the world.

Now under the directorship of John Rotar, one of Australia’s leading young composers, the group is poised to take the next step in its evolution and continue to be at the vanguard of Australian choral music.
Image credit: Kris Anderson