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Gillian Whitehead  

Awa Herea (Braided Rivers)

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

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Anthony Ritchie  

Berlin Fragments

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

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  • 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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Stephan Prock  

Cages for the Wind

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 2010
a song cycle for soprano and piano

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    also available for soprano and orchestra
  • Programme Note

    One afternoon Margaret Medlyn and I sat across her kitchen table to discuss poems I might set as the basis of a song cycle for her. She produced quite a stack of New Zealand poems for me to consider: among the items in this pile was a slim, rather unassuming little volume by Alistair Campbell titled Galliploi & Other Poems. Whilst Gallipoli naturally conjures up powerful socio-historical associations for all New Zealanders, I was almost immediately drawn to the second set of poems in the book titled Cages for the Wind and decided to set the last five poems in the collection as a cycle. What struck me most, and still seems so fresh now, was Campbell’s talent for evoking deeply powerful images and feelings in poems of matchless delicacy and subtlety. This understated approach is what drew me to a poem like “Whitey” in which Campbell couches a rumination on death in what appears to be at first an almost whimsical remembered dialogue with a blackbird (the eponymous Whitey) that used to frequent his garden. Most important for me as a composer, though, was the immediately singable lyricism of the poems. I distinctly recall the way, as I began reading it, “Words and Roses” (the first song, and one of Campbell’s most famous poems), began to suggest musical atmospheres and vocal lines unfolding in my mind like buds of roses unfurling their petals. When poems being to sing themselves to me, I know I have found the right material.

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Christopher Marshall  

Flights of Fancy

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1994
Settings of eight New Zealand poems for Soprano and Piano

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Gillian Whitehead  

Requiem

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1981
for mezzo soprano and organ

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  • Programme Note

    Undoubtedly, this is one of Whitehead’s more unusual collaborations. The work, intended for five dancers and organ, with soprano added at the composer’s request, was to have been performed in five cathedrals around Britain during the summer of 1982. Due to the cancellation of the dance component however, the work received performance in only one of the cathedrals – Carlisle – but was later presented with a solo dancer, Bronwyn Judge, at the 1987 Sonic Circus in Wellington. The singer on that occasion was Glenys Taylor and the organist Douglas Mews. The composer initially delayed beginning work on the piece, since her sister was expecting a baby, and a Requiem did not seem an appropriate preoccupation. The successful birth was however followed by two close-family deaths and it was these which provided the composer with the emotional impetus to proceed with the composition. (Programme note by Emma Carle and Jack Body).

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Gillian Whitehead  

Riddles 2

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1977
for soprano and piano

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Dorothy Buchanan  

Six Choruses from Oedipus Rex

Duration: 23' 00" Year: 1983
For Mezzo-Soprano and Organ

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Jenny McLeod  

Through the World

Duration: 26' 00" Year: 1982
a cycle of 15 songs for mezzo and piano

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