St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne
April 15, 2018

Apart from the obvious dissimilarities, there are nevertheless parallels between the formation of a new string quartet and assembling a new choir. When musicians come together to make music there needs to be some measure of agreement about how this is to be done. The artistic director of the newly-formed Hamer Singers, Jonathan Grieves-Smith, has already established a number of elements in this contract. In this second concert presented by the Hamer Singers the venue, St Patrick’s Cathedral, offered a highly favourable ambiance for the works chosen on the program. In his helpful introduction to the concert, the conductor described the path taken to gather and then to order the works into a coherent sequence. Most are from the 20th and 21st centuries and the interiority of their texts is such that a kind of conversation between them is established. This proved to be the case in performance.

Generally, the dynamic level of the voices did not go beyond moderately loud, and often it was quite soft. Achieving beauty of sound at these levels through precise chording, clear phrasing, and due awareness given to the sounds produced by parts other than your own, was...