This spring, the Chamber Singers head to Sydney’s historic White Bay Power Station for a powerful concert inspired by the natural world.

Christopher Tin’s Lost Birds is an ‘extinction elegy’. Taking poems by women such as Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, who saw their pastoral society transformed into an industrial one, Tin has crafted a musical memorial to bird species lost to extinction. The music is lyrical and tender – a tuneful celebration of beauty tinged with melancholy – and our performance space will highlight a message of renewal and recovery.

Brett Weymark has paired The Lost Birds with a song cycle by Joseph Twist, who, like Tin, has made his name in the world of music for the screen. Timeless Land is inspired by Twist’s own love of Australia’s natural wonders and celebrated poets, from Banjo Paterson to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the first published Aboriginal woman. ‘Bursting with drama and humour’, Timeless Land takes playful delight in music for magpies, lorikeets and jellyfish, before ending on a serious note: ‘Time is running out.’ The themes will be amplified in a new work by Yuwaalaraay storyteller and composer Nardi Simpson.

The concert ends with the final instalment of our year-long presentation of Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s choral version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with words from the Bible and Emily Brontë.