Arts Thursday with Maisy Stapleton and Paula Towers

The Sydney Chamber Choir and City Recital Hall are staging Handel’s Messiah. The choir, under Artistic Director Sam Allchurch, is taking a fresh approach to this longstanding piece and presenting a concert with a sound that, in effect, will express Handel’s original intent for this sublime music, with exactly 24 handpicked singers and 20 early music instrumentalists.

Sam Allchurch joins us in the studio to commence the Arts Thursday program with insights into this production and with excerpts from Handel’s inspiring work.

Handel’s Messiah will be performed by Sydney Chamber Choir at City Recital Hall on Saturday, 14 March at 6pm and marks the Choir’s 45th anniversary.

Step into Paradise is the spectacular exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum that surveys the fashions of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson. Jenny and Linda’s exuberant and distinctive designs were of enormous influence in promoting Australian design, with their colourful use of Australian imagery.

The exhibition is presented with the KAPOW! and elan of the designers’ Flamingo Park salon – for many years a fixture in Sydney’s Strand Arcade – and over 150 garments, textiles, photographs, artworks and memorabilia are used to create an absorbing, exhilarating exhibition.

Glynis Jones, Curator of Step into Paradise, joins us to discuss the exhibition; the work of Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee and its place in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

Step into Paradise is open daily at the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo until 22 March.

Richard Wiesel spent many years in the film and television industry at Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures home entertainment as well as supporting the development of the premium movie channels on Foxtel.

Now he continues story-telling through the medium of photography at his commercial photography studio in Sydney.

Wiesel is also the nephew of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and after visiting Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps in 2018, he was granted access to their archives, where he photographed small personal artefacts found at the camps after liberation.

With the research of renowned German historian Dr Robert Sommer, Richard was able to trace the fates of the former prisoners behind these personal artefacts, such as a Stradivarius violin, a pair of clogs and a child’s teddy bear.

His photographic exhibition, It’s Personal, runs until 8 March at the Sydney Jewish Museum. Through these images, he reveals experiences of the camps’ former prisoners – who were not able to tell their own stories.

For further information:

Sydney Chamber Choir and The Messiah:

https://www.sydneychamberchoir.org/2020-messiah

Step into Paradise: https://maas.museum/

It’s Personal: https://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/exhibition/its-personal-images-of-objects-from-ravensbruck-and-sachsenhausen/

DON’T WORRY IF YOU MISS THE PROGRAM!

If you miss the program you can listen again by going to /arts/artsthursday/ and clicking on the date 5 March 2020.

And watch out for podcasts at later dates.

Tune into Arts Thursday with Maisy Stapleton every fortnight from 10:30 to noon for in-depth conversations on the arts.