Gallipoli to the Somme, op. 191( 2016)
Anthony Ritchie
Gallipoli to the Somme was commissioned by The Dunedin Symphony Orchestra with funding from Creative NZ, to commemorate World War I.
The work was premiered by The City of Dunedin Choir, with orchestra and soloists Anna Leese and Martin Snell under British conductor Simon Over( premier performance can be viewed on: https:// vimeo. com / 208422223).
Gallipoli to the Somme has subsequently been performed in Invercargill, and is scheduled for performances in London and Oxford in June this year, with the U. K. Parliament Choir and Southbank Sinfonia. Tonight’ s version for chamber orchestra and organ was specially commissioned by Auckland Choral.
Programme note by the composer
How does one create a piece of music commemorating World War I? It is a daunting task, to say the least. There are already many great works that comment on this conflict, Britten’ s War Requiem, for one, a piece that I have loved since I was a teenager. This was an anti-war statement that resonated through a generation. Gallipoli to the Somme is more quietly anti-war, and aims to make a humanist statement about ordinary peoples’ experience of the war. Ordinary people – soldiers, nurses, lovers, children from different nationalities – they are represented in some small way in this work, through diary entries, poems, traditional texts and songs, and even a military plan of battle.
It is, of course, not possible to cover every perspective. There are four nations represented in the work: New Zealand, Britain, Germany and Turkey. The perspective that binds the whole structure together is provided by a soldier, Alexander Aitken, from the Otago Battalion in New Zealand. Aitken wrote a book about his experiences with the same title as this work: Gallipoli to the Somme, published in 1964, many years after the war. Aitken was a remarkable man, a professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, and also a fine violinist. Peter Fenton’ s short outline about Aitken sums up the man far more eloquently than I can do – see following the end of the libretto below.
My composition traces Aitken’ s journey from his arrival in Gallipoli, his experience of Christmas 1915, his preparation for battle at the Somme,
8