“I have no concept of what it is like to be involved in war. I can only experience it through their related experience. We have letters from them, very very dry day-to-day nuts and bolts, an insight into how boring it is for them in the trenches waiting and waiting and waiting for days. And then all of a sudden – WHAM !! Everything happens and people start dying. It’s unimaginable.”

In 1917, three New Zealand boys — brothers — were sent to the western front to fight in World War I. They never came home. They died in the Chemin des Dames, a place of legend, now a place of unimaginable horror carved into trenches, where infantry from both sides sheltered in caves. Their names were Charles, Vince, and Frank, and they were the great-great-uncles of Gareth Farr, composer, and percussionist. 

When former Adam International Cello Competition winner Sébastien Hurtaud approached Gareth with a proposal he couldn’t resist (“I’ll be your Rostropovich, and you can be my Shostakovich”), Gareth said, “You’re on!”. The result is Cello Concerto ‘Chemin des Dames’, a work that is as much about the men who died fighting WWI as it is about the women who suffered unbearably while looking after the home front.

Host: Charlotte Wilson

Guest: Gareth Farr

Links & Resources

More details on the composer and the associated work are here.

Link to the film of Chemin de Dames

This episode was brought to you by SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music.

Production team

• Executive Producer: Diana Marsh
• Producer: Charlotte Wilson
• Sound Engineer: Phil Brownlee

Special thanks to Rubicon for providing the audio of Chemin des Dames performed by Sébastien Hurtaud and the NZSO.

This podcast is supported by funding from The Stout Trust.

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Moments in time

A composer’s response to critical moments in time: The moments when time pivots and history changes course. Tau’ili’ili Alpha Maiava & Charlotte Wilson host this series about the music of Aotearoa New Zealand that follows moments in our history that have had an impact on us and changed or altered who we are.

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