Vita et Mors

Overview

The Canberra Intervarsity Choral Festival 2026 and Canberra Festival Orchestra present a celebration of life and death, continuing a 76-year tradition of Australian University Choral Festivals.

Olivia Swift conducts the choir in Brahms' A German Requiem, a deeply human response to loss and consolation. Setting German biblical texts chosen by the composer, Brahms writes not a mass for the dead, but music for the living. The work moves from grief toward comfort, closing in a place of quiet, hard-won peace.

Shilong Ye has selected music of 19th & 20th Centuries to contrast with the requiem, providing a lyrical program in the 2nd half of the concert that continues the Cantabile through the Canberra Festival Orchestra. From the tragic tale of a disfigured musical genius haunting the Paris Opera House to the Slavic folk music of Bohemia, these masterpieces are well loved by the concert-goers for the past 148 years.

The concert finishes with Timothy Takach's Everything Sings, a radiant contemporary celebration of sound, connection, and communal voice. Playful, reflective, and quietly joyful, the work providing a reminder that music lives everywhere, and that singing together is itself an act of meaning.