Sydney Philharmonia Choirs 2025 Season
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ 2025 Season is full of music that will fill you with joy.
The season opens with the Choirs and Sydney Opera House Grand Organ at full throttle. There are great classics like St Matthew Passion with a Romantic twist by Felix Mendelssohn, Brahms’ consoling ‘human requiem’ and JS Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
Legendary choir leader Eric Whitacre makes a welcome return, and celebrate new voices like Nardi Simpson, Alice Chance and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange. There’s a place in the choir for everyone in ChorusOz, taking on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ epic A Sea Symphony.
Upcoming events
A Child of Our Time
13 Sep 2025
The rapturous power of Michael Tippett’s modern classic speaks to our own time. Sydney Philharmonia Choirs pairs this modern classic inspired by the Passions of Bach, oratorios of Handel and Afro-American spirituals, with two new works featuring youth choir VOX. The time is 1939. The time could be now. Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time wasn’t simply inspired by gross social injustice, persecution and conflict, it was written in the midst of these things, and it continues to speak to us across the decades.
A German Requiem
25 Oct 2025
A serious young man, torn by the death of his mother and the loss of a mentor, not a believer but finding comfort in the spiritual… This is the Brahms who wrote A German Requiem – a magnificent, heartful work for soloists, chorus and orchestra. This isn’t a Latin requiem for the church, and you can forget the fire and brimstone of the ‘day of wrath’. Brahms turned his back on judgement and drama to choose words from Luther’s German bible, creating a text that, as the soprano sings at the end, ‘will comfort you as one whom his own mother comforts’.
Carols At the House
12 – 14 Dec 2025
Here at Sydney Philharmonia Choirs we really love Christmas’ – the festivity, the magic, the message of peace and harmony. Above all, we love raising the roof of the Sydney Opera House with Carols at the House!
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
13 Dec 2025
“And lo, the star, which they had seen in the East, went before them…” Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental ‘oratorio’ for the Christmas season is really a set of six cantatas – one for each of the first six days of Christmas. Performing them together in concert is the musical equivalent of binge-watching Bach – the best of guilty pleasures!
