Five world premieres of pieces by home-grown composers and a performance of one of this century’s most significant new Australian choral works marked Sydney Chamber Choir’s half century in a gala concert.

The second half of this wide-ranging two-hour recital was given over to a Requiem by the group’s former Music Director Paul Stanhope, conducted by Artistic Director Sam Allchurch and featuring SA soprano Brooke Window and English tenor and SCC regular Richard Butler, alongside a quintet of instrumentalists.

The Sydney Chamber Choir 50th Anniversary Gala, City Recital Hall, Sydney. Photo © Robert Catto

The nine-movement work is dedicated to two men important to the choir’s history – the much-loved late conductor and educator Richard Gill, who succeeded Stanhope as the SCC’s Music Director, and Russell Mills, a student of Gill’s who was a senior health official at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital and whose foundation to encourage the arts and social justice, set up before he died of cancer, funded the piece.

Written before COVID-19 hit, it was first performed in 2021 and has been sung only a few times since. It is scored for solo soprano and tenor and choir with an...