One of many highlights in this year's Arts Festival Dunedin will be Requiem for the Fallen, by composer Ross Harris and poet Vincent O'Sullivan, which commemorates the centenary of World War 1. Charmian Smith reports.
Known as the Great War and ''the war to end all wars'', although it obviously didn't, the 1914-18 conflict in Europe claimed the lives of 18,500 New Zealanders and affected everyone else.
Many of us have family members who were involved.
Requiem for the Fallen, by Dunedin-based poet laureate Vincent O'Sullivan and Wellington composer Ross Harris, will be one of the highlights of the upcoming Arts Festival Dunedin.
It was commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet and Voices New Zealand and premiered in the New Zealand Festival in Wellington earlier this year.
It is one of several collaborative works Harris and O'Sullivan have produced to commemorate the centenary of the declaration of war in 1914.
"It just strikes us, as I expect it does a lot of New Zealanders, as one of the major events in our history.
"So obviously how it affected young men at that time, and civilians and women and families, is of great interest to us because we are New Zealanders,'' O'Sullivan says.
''That is the world we know and come from, so naturally that's the one that engages our interest as a writer and musician.''
They were determined not to make their work a celebration of war, he says.
''There's probably enough of that stuff about the war and we didn't see anything to celebrate in the number of young New Zealanders who died in it.
Letters from the young men fighting overseas show they thought they were contributing to an empire effort but individually their concern was what was going on at home.
They were desperate to get back home, O'Sullivan says.
The work is based on the Latin requiem mass, a traditional form dedicated to the memory of the dead, but O'Sullivan has interspersed lyrics with the feeling of individual regret with the Latin text.
Each traditional part of the mass, such as the Sanctus or the Agnus Dei, sets the mood for the music and the words, but once that is set, you can build another emphasis, not on the communal response to suffering but on the individual, he says.
''It's always the story of one man. Men die alone, they don't die as armies,'' he says.
While there may not be much involvement with Latin masses these days, the requiem has become an important musical form and numerous composers, such as Mozart, Verdi, Brahms and Britten, with his huge War Requiem, have used it.
Britten interspersed poems by war poet Wilfred Owen between the Latin texts, but O'Sullivan has interwoven his texts with the Latin ones, making them part of the same song.
The work is more intimate than most classical requiems, which usually involve full orchestras and large choirs, Harris says.
It is more of a chamber work with the quartet, a choir of 16 and taonga puoro, traditional Maori instruments, played by Horomona Horo.
''It's not pompous or grandiose; it's kind of modest, but it does reach people at the same time.''
Although he has a long-standing interest in taonga puoro and played koauau (small flute) in the 1970s, this is the first time he has integrated them into a work in a carefully woven way, he says.
''Horomona Horo has actually contributed to the piece in terms of his own playing.
"We two agreed on the kinds of notes that would be in one particular section or other, and he played that according to the way he imagined it, so he's actually part-composer of the piece.''
Traditional instruments are enormously flexible within a limited range compared with, say, a Western flute, which is designed to stay on the notes of a known scale.
They can fill in the gaps between notes and give a distinctive character to the performance, Harris says.
To increase the engagement of the audience with the piece, stage director Jonathan Alver uses movement and lighting and a character, the Old Cobber, to create a piece of music theatre that would work on many levels.
It is staged like a masque or a ritual, the opera and theatre director says.
''Vincent had managed to bring these young dead soldiers back to life and I thought it would be fantastic if we could use that sense.
"He'd also created within it a solo tenor. He was to be a member of the choir who would step forward and sing the parts,'' Alver says.
''I felt the tenor was not connected to the others. I felt he was perhaps a survivor and a man looking back at how he lost all his friends.
"Once I told Vincent this, he got very excited and said 'Wow! that's something I could really work with'.''
So they created the Old Cobber who had survived the war and was back in New Zealand alone thinking of his old mates.
Their spirits are evoked by the taonga puoro player.
''The Old Cobber, the survivor looking back, is the true voice of regret because they were his cobbers, his mates that the requiem is about, and there's also the regret of the survivor because the war is never over for the survivors, and I think we wanted to suggest that,'' O'Sullivan says.
At its premiere in the New Zealand Festival, Requiem for the Fallen was received with standing ovations and a sellout performance, something that doesn't often happen in classical music, according to Harris and Sullivan.
The pair have collaborated on several pieces about the war, including Notes From the Front, a song cycle about Dunedin-born mathematician Alexander Aitken, who served in the war, which will premiere in Wellington next Thursday, and an opera, Brass Poppies, which is about the Wellington Battalion that took Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli and is set simultaneously in Gallipoli and the Aro Valley in Wellington.
It will premiere in the International Arts Festival in 2016.
They also collaborated on Ross Harris' Symphony No2, a setting of O'Sullivan's poems about New Zealand soldiers shot for desertion in World War 1.
It was performed by the Auckland Philharmonia in 2006 and 2010.
See it
Requiem for the Fallen, by Ross Harris and Vincent O'Sullivan, concludes Arts Festival Dunedin on October 19 at 3pm in the Dunedin Town Hall. It features the New Zealand String Quartet, Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir conducted by Karen Grylls with tenor Richard Greager, and taonga puoro player Horomona Horo.
The full Arts Festival Dunedin programme is online at www.artsfestivaldunedin.co.nz. Bookings can be made online at www.ticketdirect.co.nz, at the Regent Theatre, Dunedin, or other TicketDirect offices.