Tower Voices New Zealand
Best Classical Album, New Zealand Music Awards 2006
Gillian Whitehead’s expansive Taiohi Taiao towers above all else. Its spirituality captures the depths of Aroha Yates-Smith’s Māori text, where the life-giving force of water transfers in the second part to the life-giving force of the womb as the fountain of humankind, echoed by Whitehead’s surging cascades of florid choral writing. Music and text become one in this very moving work. The slow static chant in Helen Fisher’s Pounamu is in perfect symbiosis with Richard Nunns’s koauau flute playing.
Ian Dando, The New Zealand Listener