Margaret Haggart
Margaret Haggart sings Jim Minchin’s contemporary sacred songs, where old hymn words meet jazz and folk settings, and takes a vocal role in Barry Conyngham’s opera Fly for the Victoria State Opera.
Those Minchin sessions give voice to music meant for worship and for personal and social-justice themes, with instruments stepping free of the organ and tunes that lean jazz and folk. On Bards of Faith and Passion the same composer sets poets of heart and soul, from Donne and Herbert to Shakespeare. In Fly she helps carry Conyngham’s portrait of Lawrence Hargrave, the inventor who dreamt of powered flight: accessible writing, beautifully scored orchestral and vocal lines, and a work of real inner radiance.
Margaret Haggart appears on
Bards of Faith and Passion
Jim Minchin sets poems by writers at play or at odds with eternity: soul-poet lyrics across the centuries, from anonymous Latin verse and the metaphysicals to Yeats, Shakespeare and living voices.
Fly: An Australian Opera
Barry Conyngham’s opera Fly, to a libretto by Murray Copland, dramatises the life of inventor and explorer Lawrence Hargrave. The Victoria State Opera premiere recording is conducted by John Hopkins.
Seven Whole Days: Music for the Contemporary Church
Seven Whole Days is Jim Minchin’s second Move album of contemporary church song, recorded across Melbourne and Singapore in 1969 with singers and instrumentalists from both places.
Move Two Mix: Music for the Contemporary Church
Move Two Mix gathers religious songs and hymns with music by Jim Minchin, marrying familiar sacred texts to jazz- and folk-inflected settings. First issued in 1968, this pioneering Melbourne recording brought contemporary idioms into church worship.