Christopher Willcock & Akhmatova Requiem

Join us in October as we present the Queensland premiere of Akhmatova Requiem by Australian composer Christopher Willcocks   

Sydney-born composer and ordained Jesuit priest Christopher Willcock is one of the world's leading composers of liturgical music. He also has a growing body of concert compositions to his credit, many of which are inspired by modern poetry. 

In 1998 Willcock won the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award for Akhmatova Requiem. This work for soprano solo, strings and percussion, was first performed by The University of Melbourne Conductor's Orchestra under the baton of Yanna Talpis, in St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne on October 2001 with celebrated soprano Merlyn Quaife. This setting of the poem cycle ‘Requiem' by the great 20th century Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), prompted a Russian listener to enquire how the composer could have known what Leningrad felt like during the Stalin Terror.

Christopher Willcock 

Christopher Willcock, completed his studies in pianoforte under Alexander Sverjensky at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and in composition under Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1977 and then did doctoral studies in sacramental and liturgical theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris conjointly with Paris-IV (Sorbonne). 

Presently a member of the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne, he teaches courses in these areas with colleagues from the Jewish faith and from other Christian traditions. 

Whilst most of his compositional activity has been in the area of liturgical music, a growing body of Christopher Willcock's work has been commissioned for the concert hall, including Five Days Old for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and performed as part of their fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1998. 

In 1999 Musica Viva Australia commissioned him to write a piece for the Tallis Scholars entitled Gospel Bestiary which was performed throughout their Australian tour in 2000 and subsequently in Great Britain. In 1993 Christopher Willcock was the inaugural recipient of the Dr Percy Jones Memorial Award for Outstanding Contribution to Liturgical Music. In 2005 the Anglican parish of Christ Church South Yarra celebrated their Sesquicentenary with a new Mass, Missa Aedes Christi, commissioned by their Director of Music, Philip Nicholls. In 1998 was the winner of the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award for Akhmatova Requiem. 

In 2004 he was engaged as composer-in-residence for The Melbourne Chorale for whom he wrote Miserere and Etiquette with angels.  In that year also he completed an Australia Council-funded commission, Southern Star, a setting for choir and harp of a cycle of nine Christmas-inspired texts written by the cartoonist/poet Michael Leunig. Southern Star won the APRA/Australian Music Centre 2006 national award for the Vocal or Choral Work of the Year and ABC Classics have released a recording of it. He has recently been awarded another Australia Council grant to write a new work for the Australian String Quartet.