The Song Company’s ex-pat director is planning Bach, birdsong and Billie Holiday for 2016.

Australia’s leading professional vocal ensemble has been a fixture on the nation’s concert programmes for over 30 years now since Charles Colman headed up the Sydney Philharmonia’s bright new idea for a small-scale vocal ensemble embracing repertoire from Buxtehude to Berio back in 1984. For 25 of those years Roland Peelman was the conductor at the helm, but 2016 sees the group embracing their first major change since 1990 under the leadership of British choral scholar, conductor and composer Antony Pitts.

So will the New Year bring a new direction or will it be ‘business a usual’? “The theme is legacy and transformation, so I guess it’s a bit of both,” says Pitts whose commitment will see him relocating to Sydney to manage the ensemble. “I’m very conscious of the heritage that Roland [Peelman] is leaving behind, and plan to revisit some of the many treasures in the archive. But I’ll also be ploughing my own furrow artistically, and exploring repertoire and types of collaboration that the Company hasn’t...