Verdict: Irish tenor offers a thought-provoking testament to the impact of war
His voice has a refinement and purity of tone without blandness and bluster. There are other ways to remember the horrors (and futility) of war rather than the theme park created at Wellington's Te Papa by Weta Workshop.Inevitably, the scale of Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War is what impresses. We're told Sir Richard Taylor's statues are 2.4 times human size and 24,000 work hours were expended on it all.
The price tag was $8 million and the exhibition will occupy its museum space until 2018.
A timely release from Signum Records, featuring the fine Irish tenor Robin Tritschler and peerless pianist, Malcolm Martineau, is a welcome corrective. No Exceptions No Exemptions: Great War Songs offers 32 songs by composers affected by World War I, from Prokofiev and Debussy to the less familiar Alberic Magnard and Benjamin Dale.
Many died on the battlefield, from George Butterworth and Cecil Coles to Rupert Brooke's Australian friend Frederick Kelly.
Andre Caplet and Ivor Gurney survived, their health mortally affected by their wartime experiences.
All in all, this is an engrossing and generous slice of history, portraying sorrow (and resilience) with an intimacy that, avoiding spectacle and side-show, connects on the deepest personal level.
Robin Tritschler was outstanding last year in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's The Creation. His voice has a refinement and purity of tone without blandness and bluster - there are certainly no lusty vibratos, wide enough to accommodate a World War I tank.
The versatile Tritschler is gorgeously lyrical in Frederick Keel's drawing-room ballads and gives Debussy's portrait of orphans, homeless at Christmas, the immediacy of a Gallic Sondheim.
Two Shakespearian settings from Benjamin Dale are deliciously crisp and he easily conveys the eerie calm when Arthur Bliss sets a child's prayer by Siegfried Sassoon.
It is impossible to pick favourites but two stand out - the rugged stoicism of Charles Ives' In Flanders Field, with Martineau rolling out assorted quotes on the side and a song-cycle by the German Rudi Stephan (1887-1915), in which the autumnal glow of late Romanticism takes on a new and charged significance.
