CD Launch for Afghanistan: Requiem For A Generation

Last Friday, May 3, we hosted a CD Launch for Afghanistan: Requiem For A Generation—the latest release from Centrediscs, the Canadian Music Centre’s award-winning record label. Centrediscs is the only label exclusively devoted to Canadian music and has released more than 290 CDs since its founding in 1981, with twenty (20) recordings released last year and another eighteen (18) scheduled for 2024.

 

Afghanistan: Requiem For A Generation was composed by Jeffrey Ryan to a libretto by Métis poet and librettist Dr. Suzanne Steele—Canada’s first official war poet, and the first Indigenous Official Canadian Artist to be sent into a war zone. Suzanne worked in Afghanistan from 2008 – 2010. 

 

Afghanistan: Requiem For A Generation features the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bramwell Tovey; Zorana Sadiq, soprano; Rebecca Hass, mezzo-soprano; Colin Ainsworth, tenor; Brett Polegato, baritone; the University Singers & Choral Union, Graeme Langager, Chorus Master; and the Langley Fine Arts School Youth Choir, James A. Sparks (deceased), Chorus Director.

 

 

The recording was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Hugh Davidson Fund of the Victoria Foundation, a fund that is directed by the Canadian Music Centre’s BC Director, the Chair of CMC BC’s Advisory Board, currently Jennifer Butler, and one community member, currently Mark Takeshi McGregor. Since 2016, the Hugh Davidson Fund has made possible the commission of more than twenty new works for orchestra by Canadian composers, in partnership with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Victoria Symphony. 

 

It was Angela Elster, President and CEO of the Vancouver Symphony, who made releasing of Afghanistan: Requiem For A Generation possible (along with one other of the VSO conducted by Bramwell Tovey—Bramwell’s opera The Inventor). Both had languished for several years until her intervention. And it was Joanne Harada who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure this recording was produced, working in partnership with the VSO and Canadian Music Centre.

 

As Jessica Duchen wrote in The Independent, in an article entitled Requiem for an art form: “If music represents the most beautiful pole of human experience, war represents the most horrific. Yet classical music’s responses to war regularly count among the best-loved offerings, so strong and so universal is their message. From great musical juggernauts such as Britten’s War Requiem or Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Leningrad, down to songs by Vaughan Williams and others, war and the emotions associated with it crop up time and again among the finest creations of this art form.”

 

 

A Requiem or Requiem Mass, also known as a Missa pro defunctis — or Mass for the dead — represents the pinnacle of any composer’s output. It is a Herculean undertaking, a musical Mount Olympus of achievement, encompassing, as this one does, four soloists, two choirs and full symphony orchestra in a massive work, one hour in length. 

 

The form of the Requiem is a monumental challenge, one that has inspired the world’s greatest composers for centuries. But to write a Requiem for an entire Generation, as Jeffrey Ryan and Suzanne Steele have done—a Requiem that is one hour in length, that dares encompass the extraordinary complexity of the War in Afghanistan, a Requiem endowed with the astounding depth and majesty with which this work is imbued—is an achievement of the highest possible order.

 

 

Seven years is a long time to wait for a recording to be released, and it must have greatly tried the patience of both composer and librettist. But this gift, given not just in honour of our fallen soldiers, not just to this country, but indeed to the entire world, launching at a time when war yet again rages, is perhaps arriving at exactly the right time. We can all hope it contributes to a more peaceful and secure future for everyone.