What an enjoyable event this was!  GFG’s Facebook post published the following day told readers:

🎻  All morning long I have been whistling tunes lodged in my head by violist Robert Harris and pianist Aaron Chew at yesterday’s excellent, entertaining and enlightening concert in the Gunning Courtroom.  It featured pieces created by composers who survived World War 1 while serving their countries.

Although the composers lived through a very dark time, the pieces yesterday’s audience enjoyed ranged between entrancingly beautiful, stately, rollicking and folky – all of them played with feeling by two top-rate musicians.  We also learned a lot about the composers’ lives and times.  It was a terrific concert.

Thank you to Gunning District Landcare for loaning us the projector and screen that helpd make this concert, our first-ever multimedia event, the success it was.

Mandy McDonald’s Report in the Upper Lachlan Gazette 30 April 2025 

On Sunday, 27 April, Gunning Focus Group presented this special concert, “Remembrance: Composers of the Great War” in honour of Anzac Day.  Devised and performed by violist Robert Harris and Pianist Aaron Chew this concert included a fascinating multimedia presentation about the composers who survived the Great War and those who could realise their full potential taken from them.

Violist Robert Harris, who recently became a Gunning “local” after performing in senior and prominent roles around the world, was joined by Canberra pianist Aaron Chew, who recently received his doctorate from the ANU School of Music.

Together, they presented a program of popular, familiar classics by great composers who served in an survived the Great War.  These included audience favourites, “Greensleeves” and more by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Love’s Sorrow” and “Toy Soldiers’ March” by Fritz Kreisler, “Pavane” and “Menuet” by Marice Ravel and “Music of Mourning” by Paul Hindemith, “Londonderry Air” and “Country Gardens” by Percy Grainger and “Spirituals” and “Jamaican Rumba” by Arthur Benjamin.

This was a poignant yet thoroughly uplifting and entertaining concert, much appreciated by those in attendance who found the combination of the concert with a PowerPoint presentation a huge success.