Voyces is a West Australian arts organisation that focuses on the performance, production and promotion of contemporary choral repertoire. It performs its first concert for 2018, Sorry I Missed You on Saturday. Musical Director Dr Robert Braham tells us what they have in store.

Could you please give us a short overview of the concert with a little about each of the works featured?

Sorry I Missed You is our first concert of the 2018 season, and involves music from the cutting edge of the contemporary choral world. We will present the Western Australian premiere of Sonnet, to the comet of 1825,by Matthew Orlovich, which last year won the inaugural Willgoss Choral Composition Prize UNSW.

In 2016, The Crossing Choir [in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US] commissioned a work by Caroline Shaw as part of the Seven Responses project, and out of this came To The Hands– a work based on Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostriof 1680, specifically movement III, Ad Manus. This explores humanity’s innate capacity to understand another’s suffering. Taking the metaphor of Jesus’ crucifixion from Membra Jesu Nostri, Shaw reframes this as an exploration of the suffering that exists presently, within modern society. We will perform sections of Buxtehude’s original cantata, followed by Shaw’s response in full.

Our program...