Auckland Choral

A society older than the country's art galleries

Auckland Choral was founded in 1855, when the settlement it sang in was barely fifteen years old, and it has not stopped since — the basis for its claim to be New Zealand's oldest surviving arts organisation. It took formal legal shape in 1914 as the Auckland Choral Society Incorporated, which remains its registered name, though it performs now simply as Auckland Choral.

Its first complete performance of Handel's Messiah was given on 17 December 1857 at the Mechanics' Institute Hall, believed to have been the first airing of the oratorio anywhere in Australasia. The choir has since settled into two main rooms: the Great Hall of the Auckland Town Hall on Queen Street for the symphonic-scale work, and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell for the more intimate sacred repertoire. It carries over 100 voices, which makes it the only choir in the city able to field forces at that scale without borrowing them.

The institutional scaffolding came later. The Auckland Choral Foundation was set up as a charitable trust in 2007 to underwrite the long term. For the 150th anniversary in 2005 the composer David Hamilton wrote the choir a new piece; Hamilton is now the society's president. The Rt Hon Helen Clark is patron. Sponsorship comes from the Freemasons Foundation, the recording label Naxos and Auckland Council, and the choir is affiliated to the New Zealand Choral Federation.

The run that was broken once, in 1918

The thing that distinguishes Auckland Choral from every other amateur-rooted symphonic choir is a piece of bookkeeping. It has sung Messiah at Christmas every year since 1919. The earlier sequence was interrupted exactly once, in 1918, when the influenza pandemic reached New Zealand and public gatherings were prohibited. The choir believes the resulting run to be the longest unbroken sequence of annual Messiah performances anywhere, and no competing claim has surfaced to dislodge it.

The hundredth consecutive performance fell in December 2018 at the Town Hall, and the choir had it filmed. The result, 100 Hallelujahs, was released in 2019 by Point of View Productions and sits on the choir's own site: singers talking about what it means to have the same 1741 score in their hands every December, some of them for decades. It is the closest the organisation has to a document of itself.

That tradition is also the financial keel. The December performances sell at a scale the rest of the season does not, and they are what the city recognises. The critic William Dart, reviewing in December 2024, put it flatly: the city would be immeasurably poorer without the choir's annual presentation of the work.

Uwe Grodd, and what the choir sings when it is not singing Handel

Music director Uwe Grodd was born in Stuttgart on 26 November 1958 and came to Auckland as an academic, holding the chair in classical performance at the University of Auckland from 1984 to 2018. He is a flautist as well as a conductor, with a recorded catalogue that includes Haydn flute trios issued by Naxos in 2011. His appointment to the choir was confirmed in a programme of Bruckner and Handel at Holy Trinity Cathedral on 28 September 2008. By Dart's count in December 2024, that was seventeen years at the helm, and the reviewer attributed to it a working relationship that produced both fine-grained quiet and full-throated Handelian noise from the same body of singers.

The non-Handel repertoire under Grodd runs to the large sacred set-pieces. Verdi's Requiem went up in the Great Hall on 25 May 2025, with the Auckland Chamber Choir added and Pipers Sinfonia enlarged to match; Morag Atchison, Katie Trigg, Jared Holt and Teddy Tahu Rhodes took the solo parts. Dart's review on 26 May called the production magnificent and Atchison a force to be reckoned with, while objecting at length to Tahu Rhodes's vibrato and finding Holt short of Italian weight. That mixture — the choir praised, individual soloists put through the mill — recurs across the notices.

Grodd also uses the podium to talk. Before the first of the two 2024 Messiah nights he spoke about cuts to arts funding, and described the work as one that binds humanity together as only great art can do. It is not incidental: the choir is a membership society carrying professional-scale programming costs, and it says so out loud.

2026: a season built around war and peace

The 2026 season ran four concerts between 27 April and 14 December, and the first two were explicitly paired. A Call for Peace opened it on Monday 27 April, the Anzac public holiday, from 4pm in the Great Hall: Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man alongside two New Zealand works, Hamilton's A Call to Arms and Fendall Hill's Perspectives from Gallipoli, with Auckland City Brass under Mark Close, and Madeleine Pierard and Faamanu Fonoti-Fuimaono as soloists.

The season's heavy lifting came on Sunday 11 October with Britten's War Requiem at the Town Hall — Pipers Sinfonia split into chamber and symphonic forces, Philip Smith at the organ, the Auckland Youth Choir and Westlake Girls High School's Cantare choir supplying the boys'-choir layer, and Atchison, the American tenor Kyle Stegall and the baritone James Harrison in the solo roles. Dart's review appeared the following day, opening on the observation that the human race should be ashamed the piece is still chillingly relevant sixty-four years after it was written. He credited Grodd with lifting the choristers, singled out the school and youth choirs for fearless precision, and described Atchison as special in this country.

Two dates remain on sale, both of them Messiah.

What the December nights look like

Before the Town Hall pair comes Sing Christmas on Sunday 29 November at 4.30pm at St Matthew-in-the-City, a smaller festive programme with the countertenor Samuel Mataele and guest conductors — Hamilton, Hua Wu and Harrison — sharing the stand with Grodd. The choir notes the previous year's edition sold out.

Then Messiah: Sunday 13 December at 5pm and Monday 14 December at 7pm in the Great Hall, Grodd conducting, Pipers Sinfonia in the pit, soloists announced in spring. Tickets run from about $20 to $97 through Auckland Live and Ticketmaster, and under-threes are admitted free on a lap ticket. The recent run gives a reliable picture of the evening. The 2024 first night played to a full house, with Felicity Tomkins, Allison Harker and the brothers Jordan and Alfred Fonoti-Fuimaono as soloists, John Wells on organ and Huw Dann on trumpet; the audience was invited to raise phone torches during the Hallelujah Chorus. In 2025, reviewed on 15 December, Polly Ott sang with coloratura clarity, Robert Macfarlane and David Greco took the lower parts, Dann's trumpet was called thrilling, and the eighteen-year-old Mataele — a prizewinner in the Nicholas Tarling Aria Competition — drew the warmest notice. Dart flagged occasional shrillness at the top of the soprano line and regretted an omitted aria repeat, but the verdict was that the season closed in style.

The 2027 diary is already published

The choir has put its following season on sale early, which says something about how it plans. On 1 May 2027 at Holy Trinity Cathedral it pairs Duruflé's Requiem with Hofmann's Missa Sancta Barbarae and a world premiere by Reuben Rameka. On 12 September 2027 it brings City Choir Dunedin north to the Town Hall for Mendelssohn's Elijah with Pipers Sinfonia. On 7 November 2027 it moves out of the centre to the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau for Beethoven's Ninth with the Manukau Symphony Orchestra and the violinist Hayden Chiu. Sing Christmas follows on 28 November, and Messiah on 12 and 13 December — the run continuing, as it has since 1919.