This year I was honoured to be invited by the Australian Ambassador to the Netherlands, His Excellency Dr. Greg French, to sing the ANZAC Day ceremony in The Hague. He chose two poignant songs that were fitting: the first, the ANZAC version of “I am Australian” which is about how remembrance can unite people, and the second, “A Song for Grace,” which is the personal story of a lady who lost her brother in the war. You can listen in the video below.
There were over 250,000 casualties in the Battle of Arras. For perspective, that is the equivalent of the entire population of Brighton or Aberdeen. It was brutal: characteristic of the First World War it was men and boys fighting against machines, machines designed to obliterate.
Some 24,000 allied troops spent their last night in the tunnels under Arras, rushing out before dawn on 9th April into the first day of battle. Each year, at dawn on 9th April, ambassadors and representatives of the nations involved in the battle gather for a dawn ceremony at the Wellington Tunnels. This year there were representatives from New Zealand as the tunnels were dug by largely Māori tunnelers.
The ceremony included readings of letters and diaries: it focused on the experiences and memories of those who fought in the battle., not on politics or victories My two songs were also from the First World War. It was poignant to see the peaceful sunrise knowing the hell the men went through in 1917.
Dutch concert pianist Willem Brons is a national treasure, still performing in the famous Concertgebouw in his eighties and giving master classes as far afield as Japan. It was an honour to join him and the Leidse Cantorij under the direction of his nephew, Hans, to perform Liszt’s Via Crucis. In contrast to his more flamboyant style, Liszt’s stations of the cross are intimate and bare, sometimes with a single line in the piano. Willem’s rendition captured the intense suffering of Jesus and, at the end, the fragile gimmer of hope.