Victoria Kelly (1973 — )
Requiem 

Kelly had thought about writing a requiem since her father’s early death when Kelly was only 20. When her mother died ten years later, Kelly began searching out appropriate texts. The result is a requiem using poetry by Bill Manhire, Sam Hunt, Chloe Honum, Ian Wedde and James K Baxter. 

“It took form in my mind as a non-religious work, based on literature rather than sacred text, with some hint of the Latin text to honour tradition,” says Kelly. The poems are filled with the wonder of nature, of grief and longing, of surrender and letting go.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 — 1975)
Symphony No. 5 op. 47 in D minor

Shostakovich’s best-known work hardly needs any introduction. The Party wanted tunes you could whistle, melodies that showed the workers’ successful struggle and the unstoppable march of progress, and triumphant endings that expressed the power of the people in a Communist paradise. In 1937, Shostakovich gave them all that, in the symphony he called, “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.” Whether done in irony or not, the symphony remains irresistible, with its dramatic opening bars and yearning, almost tender second theme. Great forces are at work transforming the heroic first theme into a sarcastic caricature of a march under the snare-drum’s machine-gun rattle.

The second movement is a rowdy waltz that spotlights every instrument, breaking at times into circus-like excess. The strings carry almost the whole weight of the tragic Largo movement, apart from some grief-stricken woodwind solo passages. At the premiere, audience members cried. As Shostakovich said, they knew what they’d heard, in a time of disappearances and brutal purges.

The final movement begins with martial vigour, all energy and drums and brass, but the acceleration that follows forces the triumphal march tunes into parody. Everything sounds over-wound like a machine driven too fast. The music slows for a pean of gratitude led by the horn.

The symphony ends on the triumphant note the regime preferred — though who or what has triumphed is left to the audience to decide.