Drama

Adult Themes

Concert performance with piano

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Program devised by Hadleigh Adams

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Soldier Songs:

150 years of war across Australia, Britain and the USA

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USA 1865:

Excerpt from John Adam’s The Wound Dresser

UK 1915: WW1 war songs

British art song by the British war poets/composers,

including
Sleep
Is my Team Plowing
A Shropshire Lad

AUS 1945:  

WW2 songs by Australian composers 

USA 2005:

Three songs from David T. Little's Soldier Songs* with piano.

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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold (1851)

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The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

This heartfelt program beautifully highlights the uncertainty, and struggle for hope in the face of adversity in these times. ​​​​​​​

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*For those closely following, due to unforeseen circumstances, the full version of David T. Little's Soldier Songs will not be performed at this year's Festival.