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John Rimmer  

Beyond the saying

Duration: 21' 00" Year: 1990
electronic music

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Kenneth Young  

Brass Quintet No.1

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1980
for 2 trumpets, horn, trombone and tuba

  • Programme Note

    Young’s Brass Quintet No. 1 was composed in 1980 to a commission from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the New Zealand Brass Quintet. It was first performed (with Young himself playing tuba) in Wanganui and Wellington as part of the first half of an NZSO programme which included Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. The following year the work was recorded by the Quintet for the Kiwi Pacific label, along with John Ritchie’s Partita and Douglas Lilburn’s Quartet for Brass.

    In writing this Quintet, Young wanted to composed a more substantial work than was common in the brass quintet repertoire of the time; consequently, it has an almost symphonic breadth.

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Gillian Whitehead  

Bright Forms Return

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 1980
for mezzo-soprano and string quartet

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  • Programme Note

    Bright Forms Return written in 1980 while I was composer-in-residence for Northern Arts (UK), is one of the first pieces I wrote that is concerned with landscape (and sea-scape). I was living in Northumberland, on the moors north of Newcastle, very near the house where Kathleen Raine had spent her childhood. When I was asked to write a piece for the Cumbria Quartet and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Lamb, Raine’s poetry was an obvious choice, as its northern imagery was very familiar to me.

    Although the piece is designed as a single entity, the quartet falls into four clearly-defined sections in its setting of the four short poems. The vocal writing is relatively simple (rhythmically at least), and the writing for the quartet sometimes reflects the poetic imagery or mood, and is sometimes derived from the formal structure of the poems. The text, which comes from The Oval Mirror published by Hamish Hamilton, is used with the kind permission of the author and her publishers.

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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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Stephan Prock  

Cages for the Wind

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 2012
a song cycle for soprano and orchestra

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Martin Lodge  

Cantus Intus

Duration: 20' 00" Year: 1980
intuitive music for piano or other solo instrument

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Chris Cree Brown  

Celestial Bodies

Duration: 25' 00" Year: 2004, r. 2005
for orchestra, electro-acoustic sounds and images

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John Elmsly  

Cello Symphony

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1986
Arranged for Cello and Piano

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John Elmsly  

Cello Symphony

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

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Helen Bowater  

Chameleon

Duration: 24' 00" Year: 1994
for orchestra

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