Music / CIMF, Concert 13, “The Children’s Crusade”. At Fitters’ Workshop, May 4. Reviewed by LEN POWER.

“The Children’s Crusade” was an immense concert of several well-chosen works with children as the focus.

Duo pianists, Edward and Stephanie Neeman, were the first on the program with Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite”. 

Narrated by Canberra actor Christopher Samuel Carroll, it included extracts of these well-known children’s fables from “Sleeping Beauty”, “Tom Thumb” and “Beauty and the Beast” amongst others. 

Carroll’s resonant voice delivered the words with a calming, enveloping warmth and Ravel’s music was played with great sensitivity and colour.

“The Conversations of the Beauty and the Beast” was especially memorable for its appealing melodies so well played.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose” was given a fine reading again by Carroll with the sentiment at a well-judged level. 

Roland Peelman on piano and James Wannan on viola accompanied the words with music by Camille Saint-Saёns, the Sonata Opus 68 and the “Vocalise from Parysatis”. Sally Walker gave an ethereal sound of the nightingale with the piccolo. The combined performance of words and music by these four artists was magical.

Benjamin Britten’s pacifist work, “Children’s Crusade”, tells the story of 55 children orphaned at the outbreak of war in Poland in 1939, traversing the snow together, battling hunger and conflict as they search for a land where peace reigns.

Triggered by one of Bertholt Brecht’s most poignant poems, “Children’s Crusade 1939”, Britten’s work is a stark reminder of the impact of war on children.

Carroll gave a considered reading that brought out the poignancy of Brecht’s poem and it was followed by Britten’s work sung by Canberra’s Luminescence Children’s Choir.

Conducted by AJ America, the choir sang this challenging work with confidence, producing a sound of haunting beauty. Several of the choir members had solo passages to deliver, many with difficult entries, but they all performed them very well.

Music for this work was performed by Edward and Stephanie Neeman, piano, Veronica Milroy, organ and the electrifying percussion was by Thomas Chalker, Valdas Cameron, Oliver Feitz, Demi Katheklakis and Emma Piva.

The final work of the evening was “Deine Mami”, a 2021 rendition of a touching letter written by composer Sam Weiss’ great-grandmother to her little girl Nelly, as they were leaving Berlin in 1936. This melodic work was sung by the Luminescence Children’s Choir with astonishing beauty.