Sacrifice - The Lost Songbirds of the Somme, Canberra

A Conversation & Concert

Concert (8pm) $45, $35 Concessions and Music Viva Subscribers

Conversation free (6.30-7.30)

Listen to the music and the voices of the Somme! This event will celebrate twelve composers of six nations (Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, Germany and France) who died, were injured or who served at the Battle of the Somme 100 years ago. We also focus on the villages destroyed in those battles.

The concert starting at 8pm presents music composed in the trenches, in a hospital, and pieces written just before the composers joined up. The program will also, in July 2016, be performed in France in the churches of the Somme villages that were flattened by the artillery bombardments of both sides. It will end with a tribute to the 500 odd pipers killed in action, three of whom were awarded Victoria Crosses for their heroic playing.

Music: Music by FS Kelly, Willie Braithwaite Manson, Georges Wilkinson, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, Francis Purcell Warren, William Laurie, Walter Braunfels, Botho Sigwart, Reynaldo Hahn and Jacques Ibert.

The associated free symposium at 6.30 will focus specifically on this conflict of flesh versus steel and how that trauma affected the future history of the nations involved. It will ask:

How did the Somme usher in the world of modern warfare? What was its cultural cost? What was the cost of the de-sensitisation that survival required?

Performed by:

Sculthorpe String Quntet, Andrew Goodwin tenor, Anton Wurzer accordion, Jason Craig bagpipes

Tickets $45, $35 Concession and Musica Viva Subscribers

21st June 2016 – Great Hall, High Court of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600