Agatha’s Story, the documentary

We feel tremendously privileged to have this year undertaken our eighth concert tour of Europe. The ACC’s concert tours have been a formative experience for many of our young singers. After a tour, it’s common for a few of our singers to remain in Europe for auditions. We take great pleasure in following the international careers of singers like Amelia Jones, Erika Tandiono and Jacob Lawrence, who honed their skills in the Australian Chamber Choir before successfully auditioning for ensembles such as Vox Luminis, Huelgas Ensemble, Chorus Musicus Köln & das Kleine Konzert and the Fitzhardinge Consort.

During the eighteenth century, young women who were gifted in music could not expect to be publicly recognized for their talent. For those without financial means or who were handicapped, opportunities were much more limited. For these reasons, Agatha’s story is all the more extraordinary.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
Our 2024 concert tour was more than just the story of the ACC and the talented singers who travel with us. On this tour, we introduced a European audience to a composer whose music has never been heard there in public, even though she’s 300 years old. Yes, the story of Agatha della Pietà is a coals-to-Newcastle story: As Tony Way reported in The Age, “Australian harpsichordist, singer and musicologist, Elizabeth Anderson has brought to life the accomplished work of an abandoned handicapped girl from eighteenth century Venice”. In his review of the work’s world premiere, he commented “The Australian Chamber Choir has revealed a composer who combined technical rigour with expressive warmth”. Since then, we have presented Agatha’s Cantata in nine Australian performances. Now we’ve taken Agatha back to Venice (her home town), where we gifted a performance showcasing her rediscovered talent to the Venetian concert-going public. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to combine Agatha’s story with the story of the Australian Chamber Choir. We decided to make a documentary, enlisting experts in the field to make sure that this extraordinary story is captured for all music lovers to enjoy.

Catherine Hunter is an award-winning producer of arts documentaries. You might have seen her work on the ABC: The Cobar Sound Chapel; Bronwyn Oliver – The Shadows Within and Jeffrey Smart, to name a few. After two decades of documenting the arts for the Nine network’s Sunday program (where she made stories on international tours by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony), she left to work as a freelance documentary maker. Catherine believes that “art and artists are not somehow apart from the world. On the contrary, artists are deeply and crucially engaged in shaping our sense of place, identity and what it is to be human”. Her documentaries authenticate that belief.

Bruce Inglis, cinematographer and editor, travelled with us for seven days in Europe. Inglis and Hunter have collaborated on many arts documentaries including Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place, Mask and Memory: Sidney Nolan and Quilty: Painting the Shadows. He also travelled to the United States with Hunter following the Sydney Symphony to Boston and New York. After leaving the Nine Network’s Sunday program, he worked with the Sydney Opera House filming a series of short films on visiting musicians.

CESMA is a school of audio and video engineering, situated in Lugano, Switzerland. Simone Corelli, Professor of Audio Engineering from the school was responsible for the recording of our Venice concert.

This is the most ambitious project in the history of the ACC. We aim to air the documentary with an Australian broadcaster and at national and international film festivals, thus taking our objects, of ‘promoting choral music through performances of the choir’ to a whole new level. Broadcast quality film is very expensive. When making a documentary, backing from broadcasters and funding bodies is only expected to cover a fraction of the costs. Nevertheless, as we believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it must be seized and we should commit to making the very best record we can of this exciting story and of the choir itself. While having the documentary broadcast is the ultimate goal, even if in the unlikely event that a broadcaster does not take it up, it will still feature on the Australian Digital Concert Hall, ACCess and YouTube etc. and will be made available internationally to schools and universities, along with a study guide.

from dream to reality
To make this dream a reality, we have already raised $90,000 to fund production and post-production costs. We now need to raise just $15,000 to complete a 50-minute documentary. The ACC’s Chairman, Bruce Fethers encapsulates how the documentary will look: ‘The story will include Elizabeth’s discovery of the manuscripts, her reconstruction of Agatha’s Cantata and the ACC’s performances, as well as the outstanding story of the Australian Chamber Choir and its Artistic Director, Douglas Lawrence’.

The Australian Chamber Choir has been working hard to support young professional singers and entertain audiences with high quality classical music for the last 17 years, and during that time, thanks to your support, we have realised many of our dreams. Agatha, born in 1712 dreamed of success as a singer and teacher. In her time, it would have been audacious to dream of success in the all-male world of musical composition. But today we live in a different reality. Agatha’s story has remained untold for the last 300 years and we now have the opportunity to tell this story and realise her wildest dreams.

Please join us in making this dream a reality.

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