It was the hushed a cappella sound of Brisbane choir The Australian Voices that opened the Omega Ensemble’s Eternal Requiems, with Samuel Barber’s setting of the Agnus Dei from the Latin Mass. Originally from Barber’s 1936 String Quartet, the repeated use of the string orchestra arrangement of this music (the ‘Adagio for Strings’) in moments of public mourning – from the death of US President John F Kennedy in 1963 to memorials for the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting and the 2017 Manchester arena bombing – has cemented it as firmly in the canon of ceremonial music for the dead as any purpose-built Requiem. Barber himself (despite his anguish that it had eclipsed all his other work) leaned into the work’s ceremonial associations by using it to set the Agnus Dei in 1967.

Gordon Hamilton, David Greco, Timothy Reynolds, the Omega Ensemble and The Australian Voices. Photo © Omega Ensemble

In this performance, the setting became a luminous prelude to Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, in which the forces of the Omega Ensemble and The Australian Voices combined under the baton of Gordon Hamilton. While Donald Runnicles conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra...