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This recording is proudly sponsored by Accenture
Accenture is the world’s leading provider of management and technology consulting services and solutions. We help our clients identify and capitalise on their most important business and technology opportunities, and we provide solutions to their most critical challenges. Our approach is to create value for clients through our network of businesses by leveraging our industry knowledge, service offering expertise and insight into and access to emerging technologies.
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Recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, New Zealand, 29-31 January 2001.
Producer Gareth Farr
Co-Producer Ross Hendy
Recording Engineer, Digital Editing & Mastering Richard Hulse, Radio New Zealand
Executive Producer Ross Hendy
Booklet Editor Thomas Liggett
Design Mallabar Music
Thanks to
Jenny Gibbs, Keith Warren, Jamie Bull, Aroha Priest,
Rachel Power, Tracy Dillimore, Murray Hickman (percussion in ‘Time and Tide’) and STRIKE
The HRL Morrison Music Trust gratefully acknowledges the support of the following organisations in the making of this recording:
Radio New Zealand
Wellington Convention Centre
NZSO Chamber Orcherstra
Strike
Accenture
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Naga Baba (1997)
The Naga Baba are one of the more extreme sects of the Hindu religion in India. Worshippers of Shiva, they wander from village to village, naked but for a covering of ash. They have no possessions, and depend on the alms of the villagers who lay food out for them, motivated partly by respect, partly by fear. Naga Baba is inspired by the silent austerity of these holy men.
In the piece, I have made musical analogies to the process of transformation whereby the identity of an individual is subsumed into a larger group mentality. This is most obviously represented in the way the assertions of independence made by the solo violin are gradually overcome by the rest of the orchestra. For the Naga Baba, the transformation is a seven-year initiation and learning process, culminating in a ritual period of meditation and jungle retreat. This concludes in a ceremony whereby the candidate must prove his total devotion to Shiva. Whilst he is meditating and focusing on a mantra, a red-hot piece of iron is plunged through his ear. Flinching or uttering a sound is an indication that he is not yet ready, and death or madness is the ultimate sign that the candidate was unfit to serve the Lord Shiva.
Naga Baba was commissioned by the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra with funding assistance from Creative New Zealand, to celebrate the orchestra’s 10th anniversary.
Te Parenga (2000)
“I invite you to join me in a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood.”
Bruce Mason’s one-man play The End of the Golden Weather is the story of a 1930s summer spent by the sea, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. It is one of the most popular and enduring works of New Zealand theatre, conveying as it does something of the nostalgia shared by most New Zealanders for childhood holidays spent at the beach. Bruce Mason performed the work nearly 1000 times over two decades from 1959, in towns and cities throughout the country, but it was not until 2000 that the play was professionally revived in a performance by Peter Vere-Jones. Gareth Farr composed incidental music for the production, and later expanded this material into a four-movement suite for clarinet and strings with harp and percussion. The title, Te Parenga, is Mason’s name for the fictionalised Auckland beachfront suburb of Takapuna where the play is set.
Warriors from Pluto (2000)
The inspiration to write Warriors From Pluto originally came from a suggestion that I write an eighth movement for Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, which had been composed before Pluto’s discovery. Just after I began, I found out that the English composer Colin Matthews had been commissioned to write a ‘Pluto’ for the same reason, and that this was currently being premiered in Britain. So I decided to change the focus of the piece; instead of an Earthling’s view of what Pluto might be like, this is a Plutan’s vision of the planet Earth. After extensive research, I discovered that the Plutan idea of the space age is alarmingly similar to that of the Earth, circa 1953. Everything looks fabulous, but aesthetics have an absolute priority over practicality. This is perhaps why, although they have known about Earth for several millennia, it has taken the Plutans until now to get a spacecraft here without crashing it into one of those pesky asteroidal lamp-posts.
In this recording, STRIKE are the best and bravest warriors of the Queendom of Pluto, sent to research the oddly beautiful and distant planet Earth.
Nga Tai Hurihuri (2001)
Nga Tai Hurihuri was a commission by the New Zealand arm of Accenture to commemorate its re-branding. The brief for the commission was to create a work expressing renewal through the new ways of doing things working in partnership with the old. The work was written especially for the operatic soprano voice of Deborah Wai Kapohe and kaikaranga Aroha Priest – the soprano metaphorically representing the new ways and the kaikaranga representing the old. As well as including solo marimba, maracas, bongos, cymbals and tam-tam, the percussion set-up includes two stations of tom-toms arranged in a mirror image of one another to exploit the choreographic potential of two drummers playing in unison.
The work received its first performance at the official launch of Accenture at Downstage Theatre, Wellington on 25 January 2001.
Time and Tide (2001)
Duggan was a television police-drama series in which Detective Inspector John Duggan (played by John Bach) was given grisly murder cases to solve, set against the scenic backdrop of New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds. Gareth Farr composed music for the two pilot episodes in 1997 and 1998, and the 11 one-hour episodes made subsequently.
Time and Tide is based on themes extracted from the music for the series, and features prominent parts for solo violin and marimba. As might be expected, given the subject nature of the television series, much of the music is tense and dark-hued, although contrast is provided in expansive tutti passages evocative of the majestic sweep and grandeur of the Marlborough Sounds.
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Philip Clairmont, Study of a Head (1970), acrylic on hessian, 900 x 590 mm. Gibbs Collection.
Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Philip Clairmont.
While Philip Clairmont’s paintings are often excoriating acts of self-scrutiny, they are also highly refined explorations of the Expressionist tradition as embodied by Francis Bacon and later Max Beckman. Although this work dates from Clairmont’s early years at the Ilam School of Art, his predilection for a heightened palette, his interest in the dramatic, attenuated forms of the Expressionist painters and his desire to transmute observed detail into an emotively charged painted image are clearly visible.
Accenture
Accenture is very proud to be sponsoring the production of this CD. We have a strong commitment to supporting the arts, cultural events, theatre companies, and sporting events worldwide – particularly where innovation and high performance is key to dynamic delivery. We believe these events highlight that extraordinary human achievement is possible when knowledge, skill and intellect all work together in the pursuit of excellence. They also fit well with Accenture's own values and the way we deliver superior results to our clients.
Sponsorship of the arts also provides Accenture the opportunity to give something back to the communities, both in New Zealand and globally, that we depend on for our continued success. Ths is why Accenture commissioned Gareth Farr to produce Nga Tai Hurihuri, and why we looked to the collective talents of Gareth, Deborah Wai Kapohe, STRIKE and Aroha Priest. The result – a stunning piece of music, which can now be enjoyed by everyone. Accenture congratulates Gareth Farr and HRL Morrison Music Trust on an excellent production.
Jack Percy, Managing Partner
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