News

• share:
• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Pin it!
• Email link

REQUIEM FOR THE FALLEN

(AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND)
NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET

13 March 2015
Great Hall, Auckland Town Hall

Composer – Ross Harris
Librettist – Vincent O’Sullivan
Conductor – Dr Karen Grylls ONZM
Director – Jonathan Alver
New Zealand String Quartet
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Traditional taonga puoro composer – Horomona Horo
Soloist – Richard Greagar

A profoundly moving musical experience, Requiem for the Fallen will cast a spell over audiences during Auckland Arts Festival 2015.

Written by composer Ross Harris and poet laureate Vincent O’'Sullivan to commemorate the centenary of World War I, Requiem for the Fallen is a beautifully staged, wide-ranging musical drama. It will be performed for just one unmissable concert on Friday 13 March 2015 at Auckland Town Hall’s Great Hall.

Known as the Great War and "“the war to end all wars'', the 1914-18 conflict in Europe claimed the lives of 18,500 New Zealanders, and affected everyone then and on through generations in our country over the last century.

Visionary and compelling, Requiem for the Fallen interweaves the Latin Requiem Mass with poetry, taonga puoro and string quartet; creating a multi-textured remembrance to our ancestors, to a time and to places still embedded in our collective memories.

Conducted by Karen Grylls and directed by Jonathan Aver, Requiem for the Fallen – a passionate plea against the horror of war - is performed by New Zealand String Quartet, Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, taonga puoro player Horomona Horo and tenor Richard Greager.

Ross Harris has written more than two hundred compositions including opera, symphonic music, chamber music, klezmer and electronic music. He received a QSM for his opera Waituhi with libretto by Witi Ihimaera, and a CANZ Citation for Services to New Zealand Music.

Vincent O’'Sullivan is a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic and editor. He is currently the New Zealand Poet Laurete. He has won two Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry, and in 2006 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

Requiem for the Fallen is not the first collaboration between Harris and O’'Sullivan. The pair has worked together on several pieces based on WWI, including Notes From the Front, a song cycle about Dunedin-born mathematician and soldier Alexander Aitken, and the opera Brass Poppies, about the Wellington Battalion which took Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli.

The programme for Requiem for the Fallen will include:

Purcell – Hear my prayer

Messiaen O Sacrum Convivium

Beethoven – Molto Adagio from String Quartet in A minor Opus 132

Schnittke – Drei Geistliche Gesange

Harris – Requiem for the Fallen

“"Vibrant, meditative, pulsating… a seamless flow going from one set of textures to another”"  -  Upbeat, SOUNZ

www.aaf.co.nz

 SEASON DETAILS

Commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet Trust and Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand Trust with support from Creative New Zealand.