The Gesualdo Six – Wishing Tree: When Six Voices Are Enough

Britain's most celebrated choral ensemble closed their third Australian tour in Brisbane on Monday night — making their first-ever Queensland performance the final chapter of a run that had already taken in Hobart, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

Wishing Tree is a programme spanning five centuries, from Elizabethan polyphony to newly commissioned works. It arrived at QPAC's Concert Hall with no staging, no instruments, and no amplification. Six singers. A tuning fork. And the acoustic of the room.

The Ensemble

The Gesualdo Six are a British vocal consort widely regarded as among the finest of their kind. Directed by Owain Park — who also sings bass and served as the evening's principal guide through the programme — the ensemble was formed in 2014 and has since performed at the BBC Proms, Cheltenham Music Festival, Wigmore Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and concert halls across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Their recordings on Hyperion Records have drawn the highest praise from publications including BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian.

The six singers who took the stage were Park alongside countertenors Guy James and Alasdair Austin, tenors Joseph Wicks and Josh Cooter, and baritone Simon Grant — a constellation of voices that blended with uncanny precision throughout the evening.

The Programme

Wishing Tree drew from a carefully curated breadth of repertoire. The programme opened with William Byrd's This sweet and merry month of May — one of the few works Byrd truly invested in the Italian madrigal tradition, its birdcall melismas and dancing syncopations delivered with obvious delight. David Bednall's Put out into the deep, a commission rooted in the lineage of Bairstow, Vaughan Williams and Howells, followed with quiet authority.

The folk song settings were among the most affecting passages of the evening. Vaughan Williams' arrangement of Bushes and Briars shifted textures with ease — from rich four-part polyphony to intimate duetting lines — while Gordon Langford's arrangement of The Oak and the Ash allowed the undulating melody to glide between vocal scorings with glorious naturalness.

Contemporary works sat seamlessly within the programme. Joby Talbot's The Wishing Tree crackled with rhythmic energy, syllables bounced between voices in an irregular time signature. Alison Willis's The Wind's Warning, winner of the ensemble's composition competition, summoned the sound of wind through gently dissonant clusters and drifting melodic motifs. Josquin des Prez's El Grillo — a witty frottola mimicking the incessant chatter of a cricket — provided a moment of pure, grinning delight.

The ensemble shifted in number as each segment of the programme unfolded, sometimes performing as a full six-voice consort, at others in smaller configurations that brought different harmonic colours to the surface. In the Concert Hall's warm acoustic, every resolution, every blend, every whispered phrase landed with crystalline clarity.

Owain Park

A particular pleasure of the evening was Park's commentary between pieces. Elegant, deeply knowledgeable, and delivered with genuine wit, his introductions made five centuries of choral repertoire feel immediate and alive. A tuning fork set the pitch before each piece began — a small, telling detail that spoke to the discipline and purity at the heart of what The Gesualdo Six do.

The audience was rapt throughout. The applause — rapturous, sustained — spoke for itself.

The Verdict

Wishing Tree was the kind of recital that reminds you what the voice, unadorned, is capable of. The Gesualdo Six are outstanding at the peak of their craft, and Brisbane — in this, their long-overdue Queensland debut — was fortunate to have them.

The Gesualdo Six performed Wishing Tree at QPAC Concert Hall, South Bank, on 29 June 2026. Photography by Andrew Wilkinson and Brit Creative.