“Wilfred Own said of art and war, “All a poet can do today is warn.” Of the three composers in this concert, only one, Ralph Vaughan Williams, warned overtly. The Australian Andrew Schultz’s warning came more as a subdued lament…

Schultz’s new work Beach Burial is a setting of Kenneth Slessor’s eponymous poem. Schultz divided Slessor’s understated text into four broad sections, starting with a soft, pained opening semitone on the violins with spare texture that gradually fills out leading to a more strife-torn emphatic passage with brass. This ends suddenly, and the final section is like an irregular hymn. The Philharmonia, under Brett Weymark, sung it with sympathetic intensity.” [Peter McCallum, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 2009]

“…Schultz’s Beach Burial, which was commissioned by Philharmonia: a setting of a text by Kenneth Slessor which began introspectively and developed into impassioned intensity.” [David Gyger, North Shore Times, 13 November 2009]