Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra - Sunshine Sounds (2023) [Hi-Res]

Sunshine Sounds is an exciting musical culmination of many years collaborating with Queensland-based composers and travelling across Queensland on Camerata’s annual regional tour. With music commissioned by Camerata, inspired by places visited on tour, and pieces by Queensland composers that have become regular audience favourites, Sunshine Sounds is an evocative and unique body of work.

The album opens with Chris Perren’s musical deep dive into the richness of a single instant, A Luminous Moment, Unfolded, and closes with Erik Griswold’s affectionate homage to the world of disco, Love to Love Your Strings, Baby!. In between, John Rotar explores the enigmatic vastness of the Western Queensland grasslands in Plains Baked Golden in the Morning Light, Samuel Dickenson’s Returning to the Sand blends the past and present of K’gari (Fraser Island), and Connor D’Netto celebrates the lush yet unvarnished beauty of the country around Charleville. After the pulsing rhythmic geometry of Isabella Gerometta’s Beams and Waves, we hear the joy and relief of the first drops of rain on long dry soil in Christopher Healey’s Renewing Rain. Cameron Patrick’s joyous tribute to white cockatoos in flight, Little Corellas: Allora, 1987 is followed by Alexander Voltz’s tribute to the landscape and people of the Queensland gemfields, Central Highland Rounds and the sweet melancholy of Robert Davidson’s Elegy, from A Short Hour Unseen.