Welcome

I call it the Messiah effect!

A few months ago, I sat down at the piano with my tattered Messiah score and its 30 years of markings, and began the process of getting the work back into my head with the help of my trusty metronome. To my surprise, I just couldn’t stop smiling. I experienced this palpable sense of coming home.

And after such a big year, returning to the concert stage, many of our singers have found a similar sense of relief – and joy – in coming back to this well-known work that we’ve performed so many times before. It’s as if the music is saying to us “we’re very close to being back to normal”. We’re back home in the Sydney Opera House, singing music we love with the most important people in the room, you – our audience.

Looking at it in the greater context of how this work became tied to the fate of the Foundling Hospital in London – a place I always walk past in Bloomsbury as a kind of cultural homage whenever I’m there –you realise this work is about more than the notes on the page. It was a catalyst for so much of the great choral repertoire we now perform, but it was also a work that helped people.

A work like Messiah demonstrates the power of music to bring people together from all walks of life and all belief systems to sing as one. As I write this, tears are welling up in my eyes at the thought of how much this work means to me, and to our singers and instrumentalists. This year’s Messiah is a milestone for us in our long journey back from the pandemic. It’s a work that helps us heal and move on, rather than dwelling on what we’ve all been through.

A sense of possibility. Of renewal.

Sit back and be moved by the awesome sound of the human voice and this most remarkable music.

And if you love Handel’s Messiah, come and hear us sing his Samson next Easter. You might just find another gem of the choral repertoire to love!

Brett Weymark OAM

Artistic and Music Director