Darwin’s music lovers are lucky to have such an ambitious leadership of its local orchestra, the Darwin Symphony. For its final concert of the year, the program paired the much-loved The Planets Suite of Gustav Holst with two magnificent but less familiar choral pieces by British composers.

DSO and Vocalective perform The Planets. Photo © Tim Nicol Photography

In the first half, the DSO combined forces with the talented Darwin choir Vocalective and its Music Director Michael Loughlin to present John Rutter’s Gloria for Choir, Brass, Organ and Percussion followed by Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music.

They both proved delightful in their different ways.

Rutter, born in 1945, is among the most successful and widely admired of today’s choral composers. His ambitious concert work Gloria, based on a portion of the Latin Mass, was not to everyone’s taste. But the singers clearly had a wonderful time scaling the heights and depths of this work, which in Rutter’s words is “exalted, devotional and jubilant by turns.”

The work, which was premiered in 1974 during Rutter’s first visit to the US, has a symphonic form of three movements, in the style of Gregorian chants. The...