Excerpt 1: W.A. Mozart, Dixit Dominus (1780), choir & string orchestra from Vespers of the Confessor K.339.
Excerpt 2: Helen Gifford, Phantasma (1963) string orchestra.

From the concert at North Melbourne Town Hall, North Melbourne
Wednesday June 16, 1985.

Choir and chamber orchestra were conducted by three of Astra’s Musical Directors, George Logie-Smith (1957-77), John McCaughey (1978-1982 and 1985-2011), and Robert Smallwood (1983-4), who researched the early Australian music in the concert at the State Library of Victoria.

Click here for photographs of the performance and information about the North Melbourne Town Hall.

For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building. The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.