The heartfelt new Requiem is the crowning glory of this Sculthorpe set

The eagerly awaited Sculthorpe Requiem brings a further jewel to a wide audience, his first major choral work fascinatingly showing how his unique idiom translates into a traditional mould. The work is dedicated to the memory of his parents but has wider spiritual and ecological concerns, as Graeme Skinner’s notes tell us.

One would know at any given moment that it was Sculthorpe, not only because of the didjeridoo but because his unmistakable harmonic procedures (with which the Adelaide SO under Volmer are entirely at home), carry over into the choral material, with the unexpected spectral gloss of the English cathedral tradition – I found myself thinking momentarily of Britten, Walton or Leighton. This synthesis – of the inheritance of Sculthorpe’s studies in England with his own broad “landscape” style, quoting aboriginal music and employing his “seagull” glissandi – seems entirely right. It is imposing and confrontational but its chief characteristic is a plea for peace and justice. Carl Crossin’s Adelaide Chamber Singers clearly understand the idiom and love the music, to which their full, fresh tone and blend are ideally suited.

The second disc contains orchestral works and new arrangements (under the direction of James Judd). The most significant are the shortened version of Earth Cry from 1999, Great Sandy Island (1998) and Quamby (2000), arranged from the String Quartet No 14 (1998). In the first, the composer wished to come closer to his original joyous vision than his 1986 score did. It’s a kind of satellite, therefore, but an important one (perhaps even a moon hovering around the planetary complex that is the original work) – it’s extraordinary how the work takes off in such a fantastically different, opposite fashion.

The five-movement Great Sandy Island is an enormously powerful combination of landscape and history (at one point it was intended to become an opera), while Quamby, a landscape reflecting colonial oppression, for two flutes, two horns and strings, is the perfect pendant for the Requiem. The Adelaide SO turns in performances brimful of power and beauty and the recorded sound is first-class. An essential release from one of the world’s greatest living composers.

-- Ivan Moody, Gramophone [7/2007]