QPAC

Every year on Christmas Eve, millions of listeners around the world tune in to hear The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge celebrate the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in a glorious display of the British choral tradition. Now this unique and precious sound, the product of generations of voices and centuries of music, returns to Australia featuring some of their best-loved repertoire.

Alongside traditional hymns and soaring anthems, the Choir will perform a touchstone of the choral repertoire: Maurice Duruflé’s magnificent Requiem, a radiant meditation on life and death for choir and organ.

It’s not all top hats and heavenly voices: just as boys grow up and voices change, the Choir’s work evolves across the generations. Which is why Daniel Hyde, Director since 2019, asked us what the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge might bring to Australia, and what they might learn from us.

Integral to their performance is a new work commissioned by Australian composer Damian Barbeler, working with a text by Judith Nangala Crispin (a descendent of the Bpangerang people), which grapples with threads of history to come up with something new and compelling.