Dawn Chorus

The beginning of the 2009 Sydney Festival saw a beautiful sunrise at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach, at a rare free event: an outdoor choral concert starting before first light and ending as the sun began to climb into the sky.
The Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, about 100 voices, sang from a natural sandstone amphitheatre on the beach just below Mosman, while most of the audience sat on the sand or watched from the promenade. The audience stretched back along the sand halfway to nearby Chinaman’s beach. Every tree was crowded with those who could climb looking for a vantage point, and on the backdrop of the natural bush and rocks on an island headland.
The choir sang sacred and secular music from several centuries ago, songs about sunrise and beaches, with four new works especially commissioned for the event
The concert began at 5.30am. You had to be there early. I arrived before 5.00 to grab the very last parking spot, as a Kookaburra was either complaining about intruders, or laughing because he got the last worm.
Latecomers who arrived after 5.00 were flustered because, they said, they couldn’t find a park in the dark; one woman told me she left her car two km from the beach, and she arrived as a rousing version of “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” finished the 45 minute performance.
Those who didn’t bring a themos and picnic breakfast scrambled away desperate for morning coffee.