Baritone Benson Wilson Photo: NZSO
He'll probably be singing in a suit, but internally baritone Benson Wilson will be wearing a soldier's uniform.
The Samoan Kiwi and 2016 Lexus Song Quest winner is back in Aotearoa to perform Benjamin Britten's War Requiem with Orchestra Wellington.
Britten wrote his Requiem in 1962 to mark the re-opening of Coventry Cathedral after it was destroyed during the Second World War.
But the deeply pacifist composer did more than set the traditional Latin text of the mass for the dead. He combined it with the First World War poems of Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owen Photo:
Wilson, along with the Australian tenor Daniel Szesiong Todd, sing Britten's settings of Owen's poems with a 13-piece chamber orchestra, while soprano Morag Atchison (one of Wilson's former singing tutors in New Zealand), the choir and the full orchestra deliver the Latin text.
Speaking with RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump, Wilson says his part is almost a dramatic opera role.
Crump notes that as the baritone, Wilson gets to sing some of Owen's best lines, especially when he becomes a soldier meeting his former enemy in the afterlife in Britten's setting of the poem "Strange Meeting".
Then there's the current geopolitical climate the work is being performed in. When Britten wrote his Requiem during the Cold War, the shadow of nuclear conflict loomed over the planet. Crump asks Wilson if he feels that shadow is back again, especially with the war in Ukraine.
Benjamin Britten: the news looks bad again. Photo: Commons
The Samoan Kiwi, who has been living mostly in London since he won the Lexus Song Quest, ponders the question for a moment.
For him, the question of peace, and of people living peaceably together, is as much an issue in Aotearoa as it is in a Europe with a war on its eastern flank.
Watching events of recent weeks in New Zealand, the Treaty Settlements Bill and the hikoi that marched to Parliament opposing it, Wilson says the challenge to overcome differences peacefully is just as relevant in Aotearoa as it is anywhere else.
The War Requiem is one of two concerts Wilson is coming home for.
The following week he will join fellow New Zealand soloists, soprano Madison Nonoa, mezzo Anna Pierard and tenor Filipe Manu, along with the Tudor Consort and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for Handel's Messiah.
