Songs of Love and War

Jubilate Singers conducted by Philip Norman.

Songs of Love and War: 400 years of love, lust, rifts and tiffs.

The many moods of Monteverdi, Brahms, Eric Whitacre, Imogen Heap, Stephen Sondheim, Michel Legrand and more. 

History shows there are really only three topics that motivate composers to put pen to paper and this concert features two of them – love and war. In this case though, the war is not that of military manoeuvring but in the battlefield of emotions brought about by love, in which feelings are shredded and hearts given, stolen lost or broken, seemingly at will.

Claudio Monteverdi has given us our concert title, from his Eighth Book of Madrigals, published in 1638, the much admired ‘Songs of Love and War’. We present two of his operatic appetizers from this, both ending sadly in the slough of unrequited love.

Johannes Brahms was another composer who explored love and war in his engaging sets of choral waltzes, written as the aural equivalent of after-dinner mints for post-prandial sharing with friends. Brahms never found true love, and in his choice of poems for the Neue Liebeslieder set of 1878 one can perhaps understand why.

Eric Whitacre by contrast did find love, capturing it in exquisite settings of five Hebrew love poems, selected in 1996 by his then girl friend, now ex-wife.

Stephen Sondheim seemed not to seek love, but rather made a specialty of exposing its foibles. His 1970 Broadway musical ‘Company’ is a masterclass in this regard, wit and cynicism at the fore, though peppered with hope in his poignant ‘Being Alive’ anthem. Film composer Michel Legrande dreamily enquires ‘how do you keep the music playing?’ as a relationship progresses, but the question proves rhetorical.

Songstress Imogen Heap in her a cappella folktronica (yes there is such a word) ballad ‘Hide and Seek’ wrings out the pain of her parents’ separation, while Richard Oswin’s arrangement of ‘Sweet Sleep’, a ‘traditional’ Māori lullaby, affirms a mother’s love for her child.

Host or Publisher Vivien Hicks