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Gillian Whitehead  

Awa Herea (Braided Rivers)

Duration: 22' 00" Year: 1993
a song cycle for soprano and piano

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.

  • Availability

Jonathan Besser  

Bird Without Wings

Duration: 14' 00"
For female voice and ensemble

Helen Fisher  

Bone of Contention

Duration: 1h 20' 00" Year: 1993
a dance work for mezzo-soprano and ensemble

Jonathan Besser  

Celebrating Differences

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2004
for acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion, bass guitar, drums, taonga puoro (Maori instruments) with Maori and English vocals

Eve de Castro-Robinson  

Chaos of Delight II

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1996
for soprano (with two metal thumb clickers)

Anthony Ritchie  

Children and Adults

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1992
four songs for mezzo soprano, viola and piano

Jonathan Besser  

Colonial Parade

Duration: 02' 00" Year: 2004
for acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion, bass guitar, drums, taonga puoro (Maori instruments) with Maori and English vocals

John Rimmer  

Composition 9

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 1976
for soprano and electronic sounds

Dorothy Freed  

Deserted Beach

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 1993
for soprano and string quintet