About the Choir

Acclaimed for a “choral effect… simply breathtaking… in its refined beauty” (The Sunday Business Post), New Dublin Voices is a leading Irish chamber choir. It has given the world premieres of more than 80 works, capping a vast repertoire that spans the centuries with a pre-eminent and joyous commitment to the music of living composers.

Founded by its international award-winning conductor Bernie Sherlock, the choir is renowned for concert programming that strives to captivate, surprise and reward its audiences. New Dublin Voices leads the way in premiering, performing and disseminating choral music written by Irish composers, both in Ireland and abroad, and in introducing music from outside Ireland to audiences at home. International composers who have written for the choir include Ēriks Ešenvalds, Paweł Łukaszewski, Roxanna Panufnik, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi and Sarah Quartel, very often with settings of Irish poetry.

The choir receives regular invitations to prestigious international festivals and has presented concert tours in many countries including France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. New Dublin Voices was the first Irish choir invited to perform at the triennial World Symposium on Choral Music. The choir also has a long track record of success at international competitions, winning multiple prizes at competitions in France, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Spain, England, Northern Ireland, Slovenia, Latvia, Wales, Poland and Bulgaria. Alongside numerous prizes in various classes, the choir has won the overall Grand Prix on many occasions, most recently in Poland at the 13th International Krakow Choir Festival Cracovia Cantans in 2024. It won the Grand Prix in Latvia at the 2nd International Baltic Sea Choir Competition in 2017, in Italy at the 61st Concorso Polifonico Internazionale Guido d'Arezzo in 2013, and in Hungary at the 12th Budapest International Choir Competition in 2009. In Ireland New Dublin Voices was awarded first prize at the 7th City of Derry International Choir Festival in 2019, and first prize in the Fleischmann International Trophy Competition at the 61st Cork International Choral Festival in 2015.

Snow Dance for the Dead – Choral Music by Seán Doherty is New Dublin Voices’ fifth album and the choir’s third consecutive album of music by Irish composers. The Times (UK) awarded five stars to the choir’s 2017 disc of Irish Christmas music, Make We Merry, which it said “bubbles with energy and wit”.

Bernie Sherlock

Bernie Sherlock is a leading choral conductor. She is an adjudicator of both conducting and choral performance at international competitions across Europe, and she has given choral workshops and masterclasses in conducting in many countries including Belgium, Canada, China, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, the UK and the United States. She is a founding board-member of the World Choral Conducting Network, represents Ireland on the World Choir Council, and for twelve years directed the International Choral Conducting Summer School hosted annually at the University of Limerick.

Bernie is founder-conductor of the internationally-acclaimed chamber choir New Dublin Voices. She is also artistic director of the Irish Youth Choirs, a guest conductor with Chamber Choir Ireland and a former co-conductor of EuroChoir. She has won prizes for her conducting in Finland, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, Wales and Poland. Her work in oratorio spans more than 25 years, notably with Ireland's two longest-established large-scale choirs, the Dublin University Choral Society (Trinity College) and the Culwick Choral Society. She takes special pleasure in exploring the music of living composers and has given over one hundred world premieres, more than eighty of them with New Dublin Voices.

Bernie lectures at the TU Dublin Conservatoire where she directs the Masters programme in choral conducting and where she conducts the prize-winning TU Chamber Choir. After her music degree in Trinity College Dublin, Bernie studied conducting for two years in Hungary with Ildikó Herboly-Kocsár and Péter Erdei, followed by Masters and Doctorate degrees in conducting in Dublin.