City Recital Hall, Sydney
August 4, 2018

“I’m a person who puts dots on paper and I am slightly bedazzled by all this attention.” So said a typically modest Ross Edwards, Australian classical music’s most performed and arguably most popular contemporary composer, who turns 75 later this year.

For 40 of those years he has composed pieces for two of this country’s finest ensembles, Sydney Chamber Choir and Synergy, the percussion ensemble collective, but he is most famous for the worldwide TV broadcast of his Dawn Mantras with a young girl chorister perched atop the Sydney Opera House sails to sing in the new Millennium.

Ross Edwards. Photograph © Bridget Elliot

The “attention” Edwards referred to was a birthday concert put on by these two groups to celebrate the man and his music. It was to have been conducted by SCC Music Director Richard Gill but he was too ill to attend, although his voice was in the room in a recorded tribute to the composer. Instead three directors – founder Nicholas Routley, Paul Stanhope and Sam Allchurch, who will take over the baton from Gill next year – led the packed City Recital...