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Maria Grenfell  

A Pinch of Time...

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1991
five songs for baritone (or medium voice) and piano

Craig Utting  

Apocalypse

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1985
for bass singer and chamber ensemble

Douglas Lilburn  

Elegy

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1951
a song cycle for baritone and piano

  • Programme Note

    This song cycle was composed in 1951 and is a setting of poems by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, written as a memorial to Roy Dickson who died in an accident in the Southern Alps in 1947. The evocative settings range from the darkly sombre and dramatically powerful to the poignantly tender and sorrowful, reflecting both the moods and changing conditions of the New Zealand mountains and bush and the shifting emotions and expressions of grief over a life lost.

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Anthony Ritchie  

Five Dunedin Songs for Tenor and Guitar Opus 77

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 1995

  • Programme Note

    Poems by Iain Lonie and Bernadette Hall, and commissioned by Tony Donaldson for performance by himself (guitar) and Robert Oliver (tenor) in 1997, with funding from Creative NZ. Originally from Dunedin, Bernadette studied Classics under Iain Lonie at Otago University. I have to thank two other Classicists with regard to the selection of these poems for setting: Andrew Barker who put me onto Iain’s poetry, and Gail Tatham who recommended Bernadette’s poems to me.

    Anthony Ritchie

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Stephan Schulz  

Five New Zealand Songs

Duration: 17' 00" Year: 1991, r. 2002
for baritone and piano

Dorothy Buchanan  

Fragments and Letters

Duration: 18' 00" Year: 1992
a song cycle for voice, clarinet and cello

Jenny McLeod  

From Garden to Grave

Duration: 16' 00" (can vary) Year: 2008
for soprano and piano

  • Programme Note

    This work was a ‘top secret’ commission, premiered at a well-kept surprise birthday party for Bruce (earlier a pupil of, as well as later married for some years to, the composer).

    Aidan Lang head of NBR NZOpera was MC for the evening, which was generously hosted by Jack Richards and attended by some seventy of Bruce’s friends, family and professional colleagues. The piece was received with acclaim (no critics invited!)

    This is third McLeod song cycle to be set to poems by Janet Frame. It is also the most difficult, the vocal part receiving little support from the fairly independent piano accompaniment. (Note: it is largely beyond the scope of amateur performers, though certain gifted adult students may be able to cope with some of the songs.)

    For the occasion a limited edition of five copies only of the score was printed (presented to Medlyn, Barnes, Richards, Greenfield & McLeod) with a specially designed cover by Roger Joyce, well-known designer and partner of Margaret Medlyn.

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Gillian Whitehead  

Hinetekakara

Duration: 16' 00" Year: 2004
for voice, taonga puoro, and bassoon

  • Instrumentation
    Voice used for waiata; Taonga puoro includes: Putatara, Putorino Matai, Pumotomoto, Pupuharakeke, Pu Kaea, and Nguru Rakau Maire
  • Programme Note

    Hinetekakara is the ancestress of Aroha Yates-Smith, the kaikaranga (singer) who provided the idea and the text of this piece. Hinetekakara lived on the shores of Lake Rotorua with Ihenga, her husband or father, an eponymous ancestor of the Te Arawa people, when the land was still being settled after the arrival of the Te Arawa canoe from central Polynesia. The four cadenzas, for bassoon, alto flute, flute, cello and bassoon, and bassoon link improvised sections, in which all the instruments participate. The singer initially invokes, accompanied by putatara (conch shell trumpet), the spirit of Hinetekakara, then addresses rituals following the death of her future father-in-law (with putorino), and then the birth of her son (with pumotomoto, an instrument used to assist at child-birth). A voiceless improvisation on pupu harakeke (flax snail), an instrument presaging danger, is followed by Ihenga’s anguished lament as he finds the murdered body of Hinetekakara by the lake, by the place named for her, Ohinemutu, meaning the end of the woman. Finally, she is farewelled as her spirit returns to the afterworld.

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Dorothy Buchanan  

Mary Magdalene and the Birds

Duration: 15' 00" Year: 1989
a song cycle for mezzo and clarinet

David Hamilton  

No Other Heaven

Duration: 19' 00" Year: 1997
five songs for tenor and guitar

  • Programme Note

    In 1995 a volume of New Zealand love poetry was published under the title My Heart Goes Swimming. Instead of using one of the more conventional orderings of the poems, the editors arranged the poems chronologically according to when they believed the poets had written them. My selection of poems retained this organisation, although during composition of the cycle I substituted my original choice for the final poem with Robin Hyde’s Road’s End. The poets represented in the cycle are A.R.D. Fairburn, Mary Stanley, Brian Turner, Denis Glover and Robin Hyde.

    There is no real common thread which links the poems, other than their subject of love. All except the first speak directly to another person, whereas the first is descriptive of a loved one. The second poem speaks of the intimacy of love. It provides the cycle’s title in its last two lines: “I seek no other heav’n beyond your mortal face”. The third poem has the poet offering to give the reasons why love has flourished: to “…invite me to speak of the secrets I never knew I wanted to tell you”. The fourth poem uses the recurring line “I am bright with the wonder of you” to describe the various attractions of the loved one. The final song is a re-working of a piece which originally appeared as part of my Three Robin Hyde Impressions of 1993 for choir and piano. It seemed to fit here as a bittersweet farewell to love : “you have made summer golden, now you go”.

    No Other Heaven was commissioned by New Zealand guitarist Tony Donaldson with funding from Creative New Zealand whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

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