Music / Midwinter, Canberra Community Chorale. Wesley Uniting Church, June 22. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

This concert was perfectly timed for the day after the winter solstice, a tight program with winter-themed choral music.

Performed under the baton of its musical director Olivia Swift, Canberra Community Chorale, a proud unauditioned ensemble devoted to the sheer enjoyment of music, book-ended its program with two famous pieces by Holst and Elgar, but in between sang contemporary works by Canadian composer Sarah Quartel, American composer Timothy C Takach and Canberra’s own Dan Walker.

A curious note to me was that, with the notable exception of the Walker composition, Midwinter, all the works referred to northern hemisphere winters, with snow the recurring motif.

The light and gentle opening, Holst’s famous Yuletide work, In The Bleak Midwinter, was sung with beautiful modulation to the words by Christina Rossetti – “Snow on snow”.

There followed Snow Angel, by Sarah Quartel, in which the music was interspersed with spoken word segments where three angels in search of the light report on their progress. The mix of prose with highly poetic choral segments was initially a little jarring, but when the youthful third angel, Georgia Roberts, appeared, the purpose became clear.

In Movement 3, God Will Give Orders, the choristers conversed with Chloe Law’s deep cello, then in the following movement, Sweet Child, Jocelyn Roberts joined in on the djembe, beating out a rhythm that gave considerable lift to the work before the title movement, Snow Angel, told us, “there’s not a wind can stop my music.”

From snowflakes blanketing the earth we moved to a clearing in Australia in Walker’s Midwinter, set to words by the late poet Michael Dransfield.

Here there was no snow, but rather firewood, dry sticks and the scent of brewing tea. The gentle plucking of the cello and the underscoring of the opening melodic line by the male singers was followed by a memorable entry by the tenors.

The most substantial work of the concert was The Longest Nights, by Takach, which picked up on the cycle of the seasons. The choir handled the After Harvest movement with serene confidence. This movement was a turning point, but the icy Movement 4, Blizzard, gave the singers a chance to recreate a snowstorm with overlapping phrasing and changes of pace that they obviously enjoyed.

The central section hit the solstice with full polyphony – “the longest night, the brightest moon,” then last two movements conveyed the ice melting and the year coming full circle. Then, as Swift had warned us, we were treated to the recorded sound of birds, a clear sign that spring had come.

Concluding this largely snowy presentation were the lush sounds of Elgar’s The Snow, to words by Alice Elgar, perfectly enunciated by the chorus.