Mel O’Callaghan — Live Echo
Live Echo transforms the Monumental Steps into a living instrument—where human breath, voice, and vibration converge in a resonant act of collective sound.
Event details
| Date | Time |
|---|---|
| 11 April 2026 | 3:00pm |
| 11 April 2026 | 5:00pm |
For those requiring assistance, wheelchair or companion seating, accessible seating locations are available. Bookings can be made by calling the Box Office on +61 2 9250 7777 or by email.
Mel O’CallaghanTo present Live Echo at the Sydney Opera House is both an honour and a profound opportunity. This work is about connection—between voice and body, earth and architecture, the individual and the collective.
Artist synopsis
Live Echo is a large-scale choral performance developed for the Monumental Steps of the Sydney Opera House. Conceived as a durational, site-responsive score, the work investigates resonance as a relational condition between bodies, voices, architecture and environment, examining how collective sound can generate shared states of attention, attunement, and transformation.
At the core of Live Echo is a conceptual shift from breath toward the heart as a rhythmic and organising principle. This reframes the work around timing, synchronisation, drift and collective presence rather than individual virtuosity. Sound is approached not only as something heard, but as something that moves through bodies and space. Drawing on O’Callaghan’s background in dance, music is conceived as a form of choreography, with voices acting as moving elements within a larger spatial and temporal composition.
The musical foundation of Live Echo was developed through an extended compositional process on the Sydney Opera House Concert Organ. Untrained in music, O’Callaghan approached the organ intuitively, conceiving each key not as a technical device, but as a voice. The organ is treated as an extension of the building itself, with harmonic foundations drawn from frequencies associated with the body of seawater beneath the Opera House, understood as the building’s foundational heart.
Early development took place in collaboration with organist and academic Dr Sing Darcy, whose research focuses on music in sacred and ritualised spaces. The organ material was later translated into a large-scale choral score by Dan Walker, transforming the organ’s tonal character and pacing into an ambitious work for 300 voices.
A central conceptual driver of Live Echo is entrainment, the process by which rhythms synchronise over time. This approach is informed by research from the University of Bern showing that during collective singing, participants’ heart rates can synchronise with musical phrasing. The score is further shaped by research into breath and altered states of consciousness developed with Dr Sabine Rittner.
The harmonic language works with resonant yet slightly misaligned intervals outside modern equal temperament. Four monumental tuning forks tuned to 256 hertz activate sympathetic resonance, extending vibration from the human body to an architectural scale.
Live Echo is realised with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs under Brett Weymark, Music and Artistic Director, and supported by the curatorial vision of Michael Do. Costumes enter into dialogue with Jørn Utzon’s tapestry Homage to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, translating colour, rhythm, performance, and procession into a living sonic work.
Meet the team
Mel O’Callaghan is an Australian artist based between France and Australia since 2007. Her practice spans video, sound, painting, performance, and large-scale installation, exploring the body and mind’s capacity to transcend limits, embrace transformation, and connect with forces beyond the human. Central to her work is an investigation into resonance—sonic, vibrational, and mineral—where materials, bodies, and environments act as conduits of energy and memory. Through her use of mineral pigments, geological research, and sound-based performance, O’Callaghan reveals the origins of matter and the vibrational forces that sustain life.
She was laureate of the Prix Carta Bianca in 2024 and the Prix SAM in 2015. In 2026, she will present a solo project at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ville de Paris and a monumental performance commissioned by the Sydney Opera House. O’Callaghan’s work invites audiences into experiences of endurance, vulnerability, and communion— with nature, and with each other, and the unseen forces that bind them, from the pulse of the human heart to the resonance of the Earth itself.
O’Callaghan has held exhibitions at leading institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto; Serralves Museum, Porto; Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Serralves Museum, Porto; Artspace, Sydney; Les Abattoirs Museum – Frac Occitanie Toulouse; Videobrasil Festival, São Paulo; UQ Art Museum, Brisbane; National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Centro de Arte Santa Monica à Barcelone (CASM); Videobrasil 05 15°, Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc Videobrasil, São Paulo; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Carriageworks, Sydney; Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (with Nell); and the 19th Biennale of Sydney
Canberra composer, conductor and performer Dan Walker is one of Australia’s most in-demand choral specialists. Among the ensembles commissioning his work are the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Children’s choir and Gondwana Choirs. He has also had his work performed by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, iSing Girls’ Choir Silicon Valley and Voces8. As a performer, Dan is a member of the Canberra-based vocal sextet, Luminescence Chamber Singers. He has been a member of The Song Company and regularly sings with Pinchgut Opera and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra Chorus. A keenly sought-after conductor, Dan has appeared as chorus-master for the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Choruses, and is now music director of the Canberra Choral Society and The Oriana Chorale.
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs is Australia’s premier choral organisation. Since it was founded in 1920, SPC has brought people together through music, and for over five decades, it has been the heartbeat of choral performance at the Sydney Opera House.
Led by Artistic and Music Director Brett Weymark OAM and Associate Music Director Dr Elizabeth Scott, and with more than 2,000 singers across six ensembles, SPC brings the full power of the human voice to dynamic music making. From blockbuster choral classics like Verdi’s Requiem and Orff’s Carmina Burana, to the soaring soundtracks of films such as Gladiator, heartwarming musical theatre, and world premieres by leading Australian composers.
Each year, SPC performs approximately 50 performances across Sydney and beyond, collaborating with top-tier orchestras, soloists and conductors, performing regularly with many of Australia’s most prominent arts companies and festivals. SPC has performed in the Sydney Opera House, Hamer Hall Melbourne, the Singapore National Football Stadium, Westminster Abbey, the Tokyo Dome and the Royal Albert Hall. Highlights over the years have included the opening of the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney and Nagano Olympic Games and being the first Australian choir to perform at the BBC Proms. SPC is also proud to have been the choir of choice for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra since 1936.
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs concerts celebrate diversity – of voices, of stories, and of sound – with programs that allow singers and audiences to connect with an exhilarating range of music in languages from English to Gadigal, keeping things fresh with premieres, commissions and new interpretations of beloved classics.
One of Australia’s foremost choral conductors, Brett Weymark OAM was appointed Artistic & Music Director in 2003, and he has conducted the Choirs throughout Australia as well as internationally. He has also conducted the Australia’s symphony orchestras, and leading orchestras in the region, and performed with Opera Australia, Pinchgut Opera, Australian Chamber Orchestra, The Song Company and Musica Viva.
He studied singing and conducting at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, continuing his conducting studies with Simon Halsey, Vance George, Daniel Barenboim and Sir John Eliot Gardiner, amongst others.
His repertoire at SPC has included Bach’s Passions and Christmas Oratorio, the Mozart, Verdi, Duruflé and Fauré requiems, Handel’s Messiah and other oratorios, and Orff’s Carmina Burana. He champions Australian composers, and premiered his own work Brighton to Bondi (2011).
He has prepared choirs for Sir Charles Mackerras, Zubin Mehta, Edo de Waart, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Sir Simon Rattle and the Adelaide Festival. He has recorded for the ABC and conducted film scores for Happy Feet, Mad Max Fury Road and Australia.
Recent conducting highlights include Bernstein’s Candide and Joseph Twist’s Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (Opera Australia), Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (West Australian Opera), Jandamarra by Paul Stanhope and Steve Hawke (SSO), Michael Tippett’s A Child Of Our Time (Adelaide Festival) and Carousel (State Opera South Australia).
In 2001, he was awarded an Australian Centenary Medal and in 2021 the Medal of the Order of Australia.
Matt is a blacksmith, metalworker, sculptor and most recent custodian of the great Eveleigh Railway Blacksmiths Shop in Redfern. Matt completed his formal training as a blacksmith at Ultimo Tafe and then undertook a series of journeyman excursions to Italy, Norway, Belgium, and the Czech republic, honing his craft and sampling these different dialects of ironwork. An industry highlight came in 2017 when he led a team to the World Forging Championships in Stia Italy and placed second overall. The last decade has seen a focus on collaborative large scale public ironwork which have been exhibited and installed both locally and internationally.
Lisa Myeong-Joo is an artist working across installation, and performance. Alongside her artistic practice, Lisa has worked as studio manager and producer for Mel O’Callaghan since 2021, supporting research, production, and exhibition development. She has contributed to a range of national and international projects, including All is Life, Carriageworks (2022); Pulse of the Planet, Esker Foundation, Calgary (2023); Slime of Time, Galerie Allen, Paris (2023); Live Echo, Cassandra Bird, Sydney (2024).
She has been exhibited at Firstdraft, Sydney; Sydenham International, Sydney; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Perth; Post Office Projects (POP) Gallery, Adelaide, Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Modernand Contemporary Art, Changdong (MMCA). Lisa is currently a Masters of Fine Arts Research candidate at the University of New South Wales.
Dr Sing D'Arcy is Director of the Interior Architecture program at University of New South Wales, Sydney. His primary research interests focus on the nexus of architecture and music, in particular the role of the pipe organ in architectural space.
Explore the art of Mel O'Callaghan
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Mel O’Callaghan, First Sound, Last Sound, 2022. Performance with solid steel tuning forks, wooden resonance chamber, and wooden, bronze and leather mallet at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth. Photo: Cheska Brown. -
Mel O’Callaghan, First Sound Last Sound, 2022. Performance with solid steel tuning forks, wooden resonance chamber, and wooden, bronze and leather mallet at Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada, 2023. Photo Mel O'Callaghan -
Mel O'Callaghan, Respire Respire, 2019. Breathwork performance with dielectric glass. Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, Philippines, 2020. Photo: Maculangan. -
Mel O'Callaghan, Respire Respire, 2019. Breathwork performance with dielectric glass. Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, Philippines, 2020. Photo: Maculangan. -
Mel O'Callaghan, Respire Respire, 2019. Breathwork performance with dielectric glass. Confort Moderne, Poitiers, 2019. Photo: Clemens Habicht. -
Mel O'Callaghan, To Hear With My Eyes, 2017. Performance with leather drum, steel gong, brass and cedar sistrum, steel water vessel, charred cedar trunk, cedar and leather drum mallet, wooden platform. Palais de Tokyo, France, 2017. Photo: Aurélie Cenno. -
Mel O'Callaghan, Ensemble, 2017. Video Still. Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal, 2017. -
Mel O'Callaghan, Parade, 2014. Performance with steel ladders, wooden objects, rope, steel pulleys. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2016. Photo: Clemens Habicht.
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Venue information
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Please contact Box Office on +61 2 9250 7777 as soon as possible to advise if you can no longer attend.
Foyers will be open 90 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and two hours pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances. Refreshments will be available for purchase from our theatre bars.
The venue doors will be open 45 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and 30 minutes pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances.
Please bring a credit or debit card for any on site purchases to enable contactless payment. You’re welcome to bring your own water bottle but no other food and drinks are permitted inside our venues.
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