A highlight of this year’s Festival of Voices, this program featured the first-ever Hobart presentation of Mozart’s Mass No. 18 in C minor (Great), K. 427.

Preceding the main work, the Come Sing Mozart Workshop Choir treated the audience to three short Mozart ‘hits’ – Ave Verum, Lacrimosa (from Requiem), and Hobart Chamber Orchestra clarinettist Sebastian Allen’s arrangement of Alleluia (from Exsultate, jubilate) for soprano and tenor, with chorus and orchestra. These pieces, a taster for the main work, were well sung and played, with a good body of tone from the chorus.

Festival of Voices. Image supplied

The Mass in C minor is quite rightly acknowledged as one of the composer’s greatest choral works, even though Mozart did not complete setting the full Mass, thereby making it unsuitable for liturgical performance in a church setting. The music is constantly changing in mood and texture, and is full of quality invention. It is also very challenging in its technical demands on the chorus.

The Festival of Voices Classical Choral Workshop Choir comprised nearly 120 singers with 60 from interstate joining the Tasmanian contingent. Their commendable weight of ensemble and accurate pitching was...