The Song Company
The Song Company sings with bite and polish across Mozart's scatological canons, Josquin's courtly chansons, and Australian choral works that protest, dance and mourn.
Under Roland Peelman the ensemble thrives on music that shifts style without losing nerve. Wesley-Smith's Who Killed Cock Robin? becomes a choral inquest that runs from parlour ballad and barbershop to fierce dissonance over pesticides; Quito folds their solo and choral lines into a radiophonic Passion about schizophrenia and East Timor. They bring the same focus to Edwards's Flower Songs, with their song-like lift and foot-stamping energy, and to Butterley's Dickinson cycle There Came a Wind like a Bugle. Nicholas Routley shapes their Josquin: short secular songs of regret, desire and mourning, closed by Gombert's monody for the master. When pure mischief is required, they pair with Geoffrey Lancaster's fortepiano for Mozart's canons about backsides, donkeys and wine, outrageous music delivered with real melodic flair.
The Song Company is featured on the following titles
The Secular Josquin
Nicholas Routley brings a lifelong love of Josquin to his work with The Song Company. This programme of short secular songs and motets offers an unusual window on a repertoire less often heard among recordings of the composer.
The Green CD
In a climate of rising concern for the planet, this programme of Australian choral works turns on nature and protest. Wesley-Smith's Who Killed Cock Robin? stands as a landmark of Australian choral writing, and one of its most popular.
Mozart Unexpurgated
The Song Company sings Mozart’s scatological canons and songs, with fortepianist Geoffrey Lancaster improvising the accompaniments and taking two irreverent solo turns.
The Song Company also appears on
There Came a Wind like a Bugle: Chamber Music by Nigel Butterley
Chamber works spanning some thirty years by Nigel Butterley, one of Australia’s finest composers, for soloists, song and choir.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Quito
A powerful radiophonic music drama about Quito, a young East Timorese musician living in Darwin, whose schizophrenia and suicide become a lens on personal and political tragedy.
Ecstatic Dances: Chamber Music, Vol. 1
One of Tall Poppies' most successful releases, this collection of Ross Edwards's chamber music sets his meditative sacred style beside the buoyant energy of his Maninya pieces.