“Cecil B. DeMille might have been overwhelmed,” actor John Bell says of Chris Latham’s latest concert, Greater Love, which Latham has been likening to The Ten Commandments movie. 

Bell was in town for a weekend to prepare for his role as narrator of Greater Love, the epic commemoration of the end of the World War II, and was seen busily marking up his script while observing a preview by Latham and actor Neil Pigot at the Australian War Memorial theatre. 

“It’s a bit long,” Bell said, adding, “but how else could it be done?” 

That’s because the three-hour concert, marking exactly 80 years since the end of hostilities on August 15, 1945, catalogues without reprieve the horrendous costs of war as World War II moved to its close. 

Act I of the concert is titled Witnesses: Musical Responses to War, while Act II is called The Second World War Memorial: Greater Love. 

The latest in Latham’s series of Flowers of Peace symphonies and requiems, which have previously recognised, among others, Gallipoli, prisoners of war, the Holocaust and Vietnam War, Greater Love is reconciliatory in tone.

Once again, there’ll be a mix of classical compositions by Bach, Prokofiev, Dvorak and Rachmaninov with wartime music and newly commissioned works by composers such as Elena Kats-Chernin, Graeme Koehne, Andrew Schultz, Julian Yu, Cyrus Meurant and Karen Tanaka.

The music will be performed by pianists Simon Tedeschi and Edward Neeman, violinist Niki Vasilakis, harpist Alice Giles, didgeridoo artist William Barton and erhu player Dong Ma, with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and musicians from the Australian Defence Force, under the baton of Graeme Morton, Latham, Tobias Cole and AJ America. 

Vocalists will be Andrew Goodwin and Rachel Mink, Luminescence Children’s Choir, Brisbane Chamber Choir, and Flowers of Peace chorus.

Each movement will be illustrated with texts, summaries of casualties, maps, graphics, projected images and paintings by artists including Stella Bowen, William Dargie, Geoffrey Mainwaring, Alan Moore and Nora Heysen, most from the War Memorial Official War Art Scheme.

I caught the second act, which draws attention to the Nazi invasion of Western Europe, Battles in Greece and Crete, the Desert War in North Africa, the bombing of Darwin, the fall of Singapore, the Burma Railway, tensions between allies in the Battle of Brisbane, and memorials to the Pacific and Asian wars, along with testimonies to the Royal Australian Navy and The Bomber Command.

Highlights of the second half include details about how German field marshal Erwin Rommel respected the Australian and NZ troops and the origins of names such as Rats of Tobruk and the Desert Fox, accompanied by dramatic slides of El Alamein.

Key musical commissions are Andrew Schultz‘s De Profundis for choir and orchestra, accompanying the section on the Bombing of Darwin, matched by Elena Kats-Chernin’s work, Kokoda, which is accompanied by magnificent projections.

There’s no hiding it, the statistics in Latham’s script are daunting as the body count mounts and pictures are thrown up on screen of skeletal Australians being used as slaves.

But the Asian Memorial segment also gives sympathetic attention to ordinary Japanese people caught up in the conflict.

As mass violence against the Chinese is delineated, we hear Julian Yu’s commissioned work River of Sorrow for erhu and strings, while the concept of a sacred war is debunked and we learn how germ warfare backfires to kill even the Japanese using it.

Most unusually, in the Battle of Brisbane section Latham has rearranged Waltzing Matilda into a minor key and altered some of Banjo Paterson’s words.

The evening will conclude on a note of optimism, with the birth of the United Nations, perhaps something that audiences will view with a note of irony in light of present-day world events.

As is customary in Latham’s performances, the quiet ending presages the possibility of peace with Luminescence Children’s Choir, Alice Giles on harp and orchestra performing Karen Tanaka’s commissioned piece, The Birth of Peace.

The final piece in the concert is Kishi Kōichi’s 1934 work, Nirvana/Heaven.

The Flowers of Peace, Greater Love, Llewellyn Hall, August 15.