International accolades for Voices NZ
4 Dec 2025
Voices New Zealand has just returned from a stellar international tour, receiving rave reviews from two of Europe’s top music reviewers. Led by Music Director Karen Grylls, the 24-member chamber choir sang in some of Europe’s most established venues in Stockholm, Hamburg, Paris and London.
The tour was one of rich and varied experiences. Their eight performances included singing Mass in Stockholm Storkyrkan and in the recently re-opened Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The tour included a number of collaborations - in Örebro with the choirs of Olaus Petri Church; in Paris with Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris, the choir school affiliated with Notre-Dame Cathedral; and in London with the BBC Singers.
Their performances included a wide mix of repertoire, yet it was the storytelling and sounds of Aotearoa and the South Pacific that the Europeans found so astounding.
Esteemed music reviewer Ralf-Thomas Lindner in Neue Musikzeitung, wrote of the Hamburg concert “And then, from the other side of the world, a choir arrives and sets new standards with its otherworldly musicality, its honest joy and its authenticity,”…. “Voices fully established itself as probably the best and most captivating choir the audience had ever heard: clear voices with an almost unbelievable volume, bell-like sopranos and altos, precision, dynamic range and agility… and finally, a pronunciation of the German lyrics that a native speaker might only have managed with a significantly less pronounced lilt … Goosebumps pure for the full 60 minutes.”
The Voices NZ tour culminated in London in a concert with the BBC Singers at St Martin-in-the Fields, which included the world premiere of composer and Voices member Takerei Komene’s Ranginui. Reviewer Richard Morrison from The Times, London awarded the concert four stars, writing, “However, it was highly imaginative pieces by young Antipodean composers — Joseph Twist, Reuben Rameka and Takerei Komene (who also sang bass in the New Zealand choir) — that really tickled the ear. All deployed tonal and atmospheric effects deftly, as well as antiphonal interplay and natural sounds such as birdsong and whistling, to evoke spiritual or ecological texts. Here was music, one felt, that conveyed real insight into the soul of a distant country that shares so much with us yet is so different”.
This was the sixth overseas tour that Voices NZ has undertaken with Music Director Karen Grylls since it was established in 1998. Karen said “This was the tour of a lifetime for me, the stuff dreams are made of that became a reality. Oddly enough, I felt I belonged artistically internationally, much more so than here in New Zealand. And yet, it was the voice of the New Zealand composers and compositions that spoke so loudly, the result of a thirty-six year journey!”
New Zealand audiences will also have the opportunity to experience Voices New Zealand's international tour programme in Wellington in the concert Ara Hura – A Visionary Journey at the 2026 Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington in March.
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