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Juliet Palmer  

A Bridge of Ice

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1994
for double bass and tape

Juliet Palmer  

Aquamarine

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 2000
for piano

  • Programme Note

    The tension between the piano’s percussive mechanism and the fluidity of water has borne fruit in countless works for piano: from Ravel’s Ondine and Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, to Schubert’s Am Meer. Not coincidentally, these works were among those played by my grandmother as silent film “scores” in the small New Zealand town of Takaka. In Aquamarine watery fragments from the musical past refract and reflect.

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Lyell Cresswell  

Atta

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1993
for cello

Anthony Ritchie  

Berlin Fragments

Duration: 23' 00" Year: 1992
a cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano

  • Programme Note

    In 1990 I attended the launch of Cilla McQueen’s new book Berlin Diary. This diary made a big impression on me, initially because it brought back memories of my own trip to Europe. I also liked the brilliant mixing of poetic and prosaic styles, and the vivid descriptions of people and places. Something else that impressed me was the strong contrast between the inhuman political situation in Berlin (the wall was still up) and the natural, peaceful beauty of Dunedin, New Zealand (Cilla’s and my own home town). A few months later the Aramoana tragedy (where a deranged gunman killed 13 people – Aramoana is a remote seaside township at the end of the Otago peninsula) changed that around. Cilla’s beautiful, almost ecstatic centrepiece in the dairy “O Aramoana” now took on a terrible subtext, and it seemed as if the inhumanity of Berlin had come to the remote beach community. A year later, the Berlin wall finally came down, and the unification of East and West Germany became a reality.

    When Judy Bellingham approached me in 1991 to write a song cycle for her, I immediately wanted to set extracts from the Berlin Diary, to capture these layers of dramatic historical irony along with the essence of a marvellous text. In reality I was able to only set a fraction of the diary to music, and hence the title of my work – Berlin Fragments (which I would also like to think suggests the breaking of the Berlin wall into bits). After talking to Cilla about the work, I decided to make “O Aramoana” the heart of the work, around which somewhat shorter texts are clustered. Sections are often linked by a recurrent chord in the bottom of the piano (the dyad E-F), which I have imagined as a tombstone in musical terms. Framing the work are brief sections which convey the flight to and from Berlin (the “green below” being an unmistakable reference to a return to New Zealand).

    The 23 minutes of this song cycle run continuously.

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John Rimmer  

Beyond the saying

Duration: 21' 00" Year: 1990
electronic music

John Elmsly  

Cello Symphony

Duration: 22' 00" Year: 1986
for solo cello and orchestra

Helen Bowater  

Chameleon

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1994
for orchestra

Juliet Palmer  

Citrus

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1993
for tape, voice, food blender, electronics, grapefruit and slides

John Cousins  

Edit For Pauline

Duration: 23' 00" Year: 1983
for tape

Ronald Tremain  

Four Medieval Lyrics

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1965
for mezzo-soprano and string trio

  • Programme Note

    Four Medieval Lyrics is a song cycle of settings of 14th and 15th century religious and secular verse. The fusion of old and new, of medieval poetic imagery with 20th century musical language offers rich possibilities. Not only the scholar plunders the past, but the composer too, making that past accessible to our modern sensibility. This poetry is distant enough to be treated with a certain detachment and objectivity; at the same time the lyrics have a delicacy, a freshness a restraint which can still speak to us today.
    (from Words and Music an essay by Ronald Tremain, November 1988)

    The text settings of this work are interspersed with fantasia for the strings; these use both metered and unmetered notation.

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