helen medlyn & penny dodd

The Wonderland Of Alice

The NZSO needs a New Zealand work for its Japanese tour in October argues Rod Biss

Published in the Sunday Star Times, 27.07.2003

By ROD BISS

The Auckland Philharmonia, always a consistent seeker-out and performer of New Zealand Music, has just provided The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with a great opportunity.

In a momentous concert ten days ago, which included a distinguished Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, The APO presented the first performance of Alice, a new monodrama (in effect a song cycle) by New Zealand composer Gillian Whitehead. This is the work the NZSO should be listening to.

We've longed for a piece like this: serious, substantial, beautiful and different. It's a simple, sad story about one young woman's voyage to New Zealand and the hardships she faced in a male-dominated, strait-laced Edwardian society. Poet Fleur Adcock has created the text from letters written by family member Alice Adcock and filled it out with her own verses to create a vivid picture of Alice's courage and determination. The songs observe the clarity and purity of New Zealand through her eyes.

Whitehead's music is dramatic, at times pictorial, expressive and angry. She also makes marvellous use of simple melodic lines that float over long held chords. The Auckland Philharmonia played with what sounded like devotion but more than anything it was Helen Medlyn's rich voice, her communicated commitment to the work and to the character of Alice herself, that brought the piece to such vivid life.

This, I am convinced, is the work the NZSO needs for its concert in Osaka, Japan, in October. Our national orchestra had planned to play Elgar's fine, but for this concert irrelevant, song cycle Sea Pictures.

After all, do we want a Japanese audience to believe we are still part of Victorian England, or do we want them to hear a new score by one of our best composers, setting words by a New Zealand poet, that sings truthfully about our past?

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