list.co.uk/festival Jonathan Mills | FESTIVAL MUSIC
In his fi nal year as artistic director of the Edinburgh
International Festival, Jonathan Mills will present one of his own compositions, a tribute to the death of thousands of Australian soldiers in Borneo during World War II. Claire Sawers fi nds out about a very personal performance
P H O T O © E W A - M A R E R U N D Q U S T
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B ack Jonathan Mills announced the theme for this year’s Edinburgh Festival. He wanted the programme to look at the relationship between conl ict and culture – how war and political unrest leave their mark on art. It probably wasn’t obvious then just how personal Mills’ contribution would be. He’s a few weeks away from stepping down as director of the EIF after eight years in charge, and he’s joked that he’s fully prepared for ‘being the rooster who becomes a feather duster’.
Mills will be bowing out with a performance of one of his own compositions, Sandakan Threnody, which, as the EIF website blurb explains, is an oratorio that he wrote ‘to honour the 2500 British and Australian prisoners of war who lost their lives in the death marches in North Borneo during the Second World War’. What the website doesn’t go into is his dad’s role in all of it.
Frank Harland Mills was an Australian ofi cer captured in Singapore during WWII, and sent to a PoW work camp in Sandakan, Malaysia. Servicemen were put to work constructing an aerodrome. When it started costing too much money, the Japanese decided to change tack, and withdrew the ofi cers, including Mills’ dad Frank, transporting them to another camp nearby. The remaining soldiers were moved to Ranau, inland. Those journeys – a series of death marches through thick equatorial rainforest and insect-infected jungle, often climbing uphill while weighing less than a third of their normal bodyweight – wiped out almost all the soldiers. Some men who collapsed were bayonetted to death on the path. Nearly 2500 soldiers marched; only six survived. The marches have since been labelled the worst atrocity against Australian soldiers during WWII.
‘My father never initiated a conversation about the war,’ says Mills, whose father died in 2008 at the age of 98. ‘But he was also never reticent if you asked him to talk about it. He knew his experience had been different to the other PoWs. What happened was a disgraceful wartime extinction, against every convention possible, but my father’s views on it were complex. He took his honeymoon in Japan, for example – he loved the place.’ Mills and his father attended a Sandakan memorial service in the 90s, in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney, attended by war veterans and the Australian prime minister. ‘That was very special. Those men had seen more rawness and more horror than most. They talked among themselves, quietly, some crying, but calmly going over their shared torture and ordeal.’
‘Every page of the EIF programme is a tribute’
‘Every page of the EIF programme is a tribute, really,’ says Mills. ‘A tribute to the people who’ve suffered unimaginable horrors, but also those things that endure beyond the horror. How artists react to and deal with these monumental themes.’ to
Mills is particularly inspired by Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor who endured i ve concentration camps before eventually escaping during a death march. Pisar added his own narration to Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony, and will perform it with the RSNO in Edinburgh.
A few years later in 1998, Mills was reminded of the men when he arrived in the UK, jetlagged, and switched on his TV, the night before a state visit to Downing Street from the Japanese emperor Akihito. ‘I was channel suri ng and stopped on one of those news panel shows – they had on British PoWs, a fair age by that point. They were explaining how they planned to protest against the visit. When the emperor walked past, they would turn their back on him, and bow their heads – an incredibly disrespectful gesture in Japanese culture.’
Their peaceful protest moved Mills, and was the catalyst for him writing Sandakan Threnody. ‘They weren’t screaming or shouting; they just wore their medals, they made their point.’ Mills set out to compose a tribute, ‘not to critique the Japanese’ as he’s keen to point out, but instead as ‘an ode of grieving’. The word ‘threnody’, explains Mills, with his trademark rigour and passionate precision, derives from the ancient Greek threnoidia, an amalgamation of threnos meaning grieving or wailing, and ode.
‘I i rst met Sam at a dinner party in Paris,’ says Mills. ‘I was intrigued by this man who was the centre of attention, and speaking French, Polish and English, then he turned to me and said, “G’day”. We’ve gone on to form a close bond.’ After Pisar escaped the Nazis, he was sent to recuperate with relatives in Australia, and remains grateful to Australia for all they did. ‘He’s a truly incredible man, someone who feels that if you survive, you have an obligation to be a force for good. After his subhuman treatment, Sam still remains an optimist – someone who gets excited by life, who remains engaged with it. That’s what I wanted this festival to be about – not doom and gloom, but i nding glimmers of hope. That’s where the real powerful moments are to be found.’
Sandakan Threnody, by Jonathan Mills, performed by the BBC SSO, with Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass, Usher Hall, 30 Aug, 8pm, £12–£44.
FIVE EIF EVENTS INSPIRED BY DEATH CAMPS
Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony The man who wrote West Side Story also wrote this sweeping, tense work for a narrator, choir and orchestra, his tribute to Kaddish – a hymn traditionally sung in the synagogue at times of mourning. Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar narrates his own story. Usher Hall, 24 Aug, 7.30pm, £12–£44. Music from Terezín Tens of thousands, including many Jewish composers, musicians and artists, died in Terezín, a concentration camp north of Prague. For propaganda purposes, SS officials allowed them to keep making art and performing. Mezzo soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter (pictured) performs cabaret songs, lullabies and instrumental works written or played in Terezín. Queen’s Hall, 25 Aug, 11am, £8.50–£30.
Conversation with Samuel Pisar A survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg and Dachau concentration camps, Pisar, a Polish Jew, escaped the Nazis and went on to become a human rights lawyer and UN ambassador. Following his narration of Kaddish Symphony two nights earlier, he will give a talk. The Hub, 26 Aug, 5pm, £6 (£3).
Pavel Haas Quartet This foursome is named after a Czech composer who drew from folk and jazz influences. Pavel Haas was imprisoned in Terezín work camp, and later died in Auschwitz in 1944. Here the PHQ perform three string quartets by Brahms, Schulhoff and Shostakovich. Queen’s Hall, 28 Aug, 11am, £8.50–£30. Sandakan Threnody and Glagolitic Mass The final EIF concert places Jonathan Mills Sandakan Threnody, to honour British and Australian POWs who died in WWII death marches in Borneo, alongside Janácek’s energetic Glagolitic Mass, a dramatic contrast of light and dark. Usher Hall, 30 Aug, £8, £12–£44.
(Claire Sawers)
14–25 Aug 2014 THE LIST FESTIVAL 71