Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre
December 17, 2017

Formed in 1939, the Australian Boys Choir was this country’s first secular boys choir. For the past 35 years under the artistic directorship of Noel Ancell, the choir has presented a yearly subscription season normally ending with a popular Christmas concert. The health of a nation’s culture might be measured by how well its children sing. Based on this performance we are doing pretty well.

In this Christmas season, we are once again reminded of ancient and poetic scenes of the Christ Child within a crib in a manger nursed by the gentle mother Virgin Mary, shepherds beneath a starlit sky tending to their sheep and told by an angel to witness the miracle event, then the journey of the three wise men from the East following the morning star, itself a symbol of hope, to deliver their gifts of gold, incense and myrrh in Bethlehem.

The theme of this concert’s well-designed programmme, as its title suggests, was ‘mystery’. It included no fewer than five contrasting settings of the 12th-Century text O magnum mysterium (Oh great mystery), a meditation on the birth of...