Cloud9’s Winter Concert – Let Us All Unite was enthusiastically received by a wonderful audience on Saturday 23rd June.  Thank you to all of our supporters.

The celebration of Australian composers in the program was well received, particularly because our fabulous announcers took the opportunity to explain the story of each song. 

The audience loved soaring with the albatross The Wanderer over southern shores of Antarctica, the choir’s opening piece. And we all felt the joy of Morning Tide.

A Place by the River by Eddie Perfect, arranged by Kate Sadler, features the Yarra River as the star of the song. We follow her story from watching the rise of the Indigenous Kulin nations to Melbourne today. Perfect muses that if she could, the Yarra would probably look surprised at the city that lines her banks today.

A gasp arose in the room at the close of the emotional Malala, a song written by Paul Jarman about and for the world’s youngest Nobel Peace prize-winner Malala Yousafzai. The choir’s driving rhythms were backed by the pulsing of the tabla played by Jay Dabgar. 

Jay then partnered with Hari Sivanesan, a Tamil singer and Veena musician, to introduce us to classical Indian music. A few choir members were heard to mutter: “Wow! Let’s head to India!”

There were other old favourites we adored performing again, including You are the New Day, In Flanders Fields, Sound the Trumpet and Jerusalem.

Cloud9 finishes every concert by spreading around the room and singing Let It Go and The Irish Blessing. Let It Go was taught to us by Ben Leske who died in March at only 38 years of age. With every chorister’s eye riveted on Gloria, a number owned up to rather wet eyes.

The concert closed with an emotional farewell to the choir’s Musical Director, Gloria Gamboz. She has brought Cloud9 to new heights of performance and love of music during her five years as Musical Director. Gloria leaves for a new life in Scotland this week and we’ll miss her terribly.

Now the hunt is on for Gloria’s replacement. Watch this space!

Thank you to Jerze Shapter-Lau for the photos.

On December 19th some Cloud9 choristers lent their voices to bring “Let It Go!” to patients and staff at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. We were part of a pop-up choir of some 50 choral voices and some staff from St Vincent’s and pulled together by Ben Leske, himself a survivor of brain cancer thanks to St V’s.

What made our afternoon even more special was the presence of both Michael Leunig whose poem and artwork in turn inspired Suzann Frisk to put it to music.

Many of you will know that Cloud9 closes its concerts with “Let It Go!” which we’ve done since Ben Leske taught us the song some four years ago.

Under warnings of torrential rain and storms, Cloud9 gathered on December 2^nd for our Christmas Concert. While heavy, the rain didn’t deter us, or our large and enthusiastic audience. We all stayed dry and the irony of singing the spirituals Deep River and Didn’t it Rain wasn’t lost on us.

There were two notable milestones in this performance.

First was complex six-part singing concurrent with playing tuned wine glasses in the ethereal Stars by Eriks Estevals. This piece is now a firm Cloud9 favourite and induced both tears and goosebumps in some of our audience members. Secondly, we added Church Slavonic to the list of languages we’ve sung in with Bogoroditse Devo from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil.

We loved singing some of our other favourites: Seal Lullaby, Wherever You Are and the Cantique de Jean Racine among a variety of new pieces.

We were thrilled to welcome our guest performers, Hilary Taylor and Roger Heagney OAM. Hilary has performed with the Royal Opera, the Glyndebourne and Salzburg Festivals, the Victoria State Opera and Australian Opera. Roger is a pianist, harpsichordist, composer and choral conductor and accompanied Hilary in this performance including three of his own compositions.

Some of our audience members told us their favourite part of the concert was when Cloud9 spontaneously began quietly humming in the back row to accompany Hilary’s beautiful rendition of O Holy Night.

Enormous thanks to Gloria and Annabelle, Hilary and Roger and everyone in Cloud9 who worked behind the scenes to ensure this performance ran smoothly. We are immensely grateful to our loyal family and friends who braved the rain to support us. We loved hearing yet again that this was ‘our best concert ever!’

We are already looking forward to meeting again on February 1^st to begin another year of creating beautiful music together.

JM, Cloud9 Member

Almost ready for showtime

Didn’t it rain!