Beautiful and moving piece honours those lost

Voice New Zealand Chamber Choir presents Reimagining Mozart

Sunday, March 30 — St Paul’s Cathedral

Review by BRENDA HARWOOD

 

The vaulted ceilings of St Paul’s Cathedral provided the perfect acoustic for the glorious sound of Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir is a wondrous performance of Reimagining Mozart last Sunday for Dunedin Arts Festival.

 

Composed by Robert Wiremu, this extraordinarily beautiful and moving piece takes Mozart’s Requiem and cleverly adjusts it in tribute to those lost in the Mt Erebus disaster in 1979.

 

The piece takes the composer’s imagined idea that a passenger on the doomed flight was listening to Mozart’s Requiem on an old-school tape ‘‘walkman’’ at the time of the crash and, although much of the music survived intact, the tape was damaged.

 

Beginning with a Kāranga, the performance then moved into Wiremu’s reimagined versions of the Requiem’s choral movements, including Requiem Aeternum, Kyrie Eleison, Confutatis, Recordare, Dies Irae, Lacrymosa, and back to the Requiem Aeternum and Kyrie Eleison.

 

Conducted by Jono Palmer, the 24 superb Voices NZ singers gave moving, thrilling, and gloriously beautiful performances of each movement, including the stops and starts of the imagined damaged tape with pinpoint accuracy.      

 

They were accompanied throughout by a hard-working chamber orchestra, comprising Mark Menzies (concertmaster), Jonathan Tanner (violin), Sharon Baylis (viola), Philippa Lodge (viola), James Bush (cello), Hugo Zanker (cello) and Justin De Hart (vibraphone).

 

Every movement was brilliant and beautiful, with the favourites for this reviewer being the spine-chilling Kore - emptiness movement incorporating Mozart’s fiery Dies Irae, and the achingly gorgeous Poroporo -farewell featuring the ethereal Lacrymosa.

 

The concert concluded with a lovely tribute to the late Helen Acheson, a long-standing member of Voices NZ, with Marama - light, an arrangement of Mozart’s final composition Ave Verum Corpus.

 

All in all, the Reimagining Mozart concert was a spellbinding adaptation of a much-loved favourite of the choral repertoire, that was both clever and moving. Bravo!