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Choral Review
A world premiere, plus a possible US premiere, for Memorial Day weekend by the STL Chamber Chorus
George Yeh of KDHX
June 5, 2023
For some years now, the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus has presented its season-closing concert on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. That was the case again this year, with the SLCC’s concert at St. Margaret of Scotland Church, in the Shaw neighborhood [...]
[...] The second such selection [of past and present SLCC composers-in-residence], and the fifth work on the program, was “Waves of Gallipoli” by Melissa Dunphy (born 1980), an SLCC commission from three seasons back, premiered in late 2019 just before the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the concert’s one work with some sort of connection to the general theme of Memorial Day. However, this work approaches from an oblique angle away from America, as it clearly refers to the 1915 Gallipoli campaign of World War I, one of the very worst military disasters in British history, with tremendous casualties and essentially no military gain worth noting. Ms. Dunphy selected epitaphs from the graves of five fallen ANZAC soldiers (from Australia and New Zealand), framed by lines from Leon Gellert (1892-1977), an Australian poet and survivor of the Gallipoli campaign. For a text based on such horrific history, Ms. Dunphy’s work is actually quite restrained, never trying to approximate the volume of combat. Instead, she employs understated effects like whispering and melisma, and resists any temptation to over-sentimentalize the words.[...]