Using a heritage-listed coal-fired power station to stage a concert about the disastrous effects of climate change on our wildlife is a potent symbolic statement.

It is one that resonates with the rugged-up audience on a chilly afternoon when they file into the massive stripped-back shell of Rozelle’s White Bay Power Station, which last century provided electricity for the city’s trains and trams, for Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ Lost Birds recital conducted by Artistic Director Brett Weymark.

Featuring the Chamber Choir and an ensemble of five musicians, this is a scaled-down production which struggles at times to cut through the challenging acoustics of the vast three-level building which is open to the outside world.

From my seat about 12 rows back in the centre section there are occasional distractions from traffic noise and what sounds like machine hum – fine for a rock concert but not for 47 unamplified performers.

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs: Lost Birds. Photo © Keith Saunders

That said, the choir is in excellent voice for a program that features excerpts from British singer and composer Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s vocal version of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, accompanied by a string quartet featuring violinist sisters Fiona and Leone Ziegler, violist Nicole Forsyth and cellist Anthea Cottee, alongside song cycles by Australian composer Joe Twist and US two-time GRAMMY winner Christopher Tin.

The highlight of the afternoon is Twist’s Timeless Land cycle, which he wrote during the COVID lockdowns when he was staying with his parents at Burleigh Heads on Queensland’s Gold Coast. He and his writer father Jack were concerned about the impact of the 2019 bushfires on wildlife and the environment, and subsequent political inaction on climate change.

Using the works of some of Australia’s celebrated poets – Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Michael Leunig and Oodgeroo Noonuccal among them – it is both a celebration of our unique creatures and landscapes and, in Ashes by Jack Twist, a stunning description of the fires as the choir chants the awful statistics: “143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs”.

There are lighter moments as well with a nice doo-wop groove for Murray’s Jellyfish and Leunig’s wistfully disturbing Magpie.

Twist’s work is in strong contrast to the plenitude of the Vivaldi Autumn setting of Henry Alford’s Song of Harvest earlier in the program.

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs: Lost Birds. Photo © Keith Saunders

The second half gets off to a humorous start with the choristers donning beanies and scarves for the Vivaldi Winter setting, complete with musical “brrrrs”, and with Swingle-style vocalise for the cosy fireside section.

Tin’s song cycle The Lost Birds closes the program, its 45 minutes of retro cinematic music, driven by Tim Cunniffe’s sensitive piano and the quartet, built around poems celebrating birdlife by Christina Rossetti and US poets Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale.

Tin makes an eloquent case for our concern about the flocks of birds “a mile wide” of yesteryear being shot out of the sky and further reduced by pollution and climate change so that now we live in a “silent world”. It makes for a thoughtful, if rather low-key, ending to the concert.

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs: Lost Birds. Photo © Keith Saunders

The use of the power station-cum-cultural hub provides mixed results – a strong metaphor for the program’s content but an acoustic where too much is lost with the more subtle moments failing to cut through to the listener.

The SPC is back at its Sydney Opera House home for its next production, Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of our Time on 13 September.