Music / Australian World Orchestra, Llewellyn Hall, 2 June. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.
THE idea of the Australian World Orchestra was to bring expatriate Australian orchestral musicians working in various parts of the world back to Australia each year to form a ‘pop-up’ symphony orchestra to do a short tour.
It has been the brainchild of Alexander Briger, who is normally based in Paris, and is now in its 10th year.
Three hundred Australian musicians have been part of it in this period, some returning home, some locally based. The restrictions on international movements have meant that this year’s participants are almost all Australia-based, but that has certainly not affected the quality of the music presented. We would hope there is no longer any cultural cringe around an expectation that Australian musicians have to perform in Europe or the Americas before being considered “good enough”.
The AWO presented three works for this concert. Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture Op.62, from 1807, Schumann’s Symphony No.2 in C major, Op.61 from 1847 and Paul Dean’s Symphony, composed this year. This concert was its first public performance. The Beethoven and the Schumann worked delightfully. The orchestra was well balanced, with each section playing their roles separately and as part of the overall sound.
The highlight of the concert was the new Dean Symphony, commissioned for the AWO. It was essentially using the same musical forces as the Beethoven and the Schumann, but with a totally different approach to how the musicians worked together. The older works use the strings as the core of the music with the brass and the winds adding melodic themes and tonal colour. Dean happily uses or combines instruments in unexpected ways that are exciting and a treat to the ear.
The work opens with the two flute and two clarinets up the side aisles playing fragments of bird song which gradually build to a cacophony of bird noise while the strings all play high harmonics. This shifts to a melodic theme on the violas (which got a lot of solo spots) and joined by the cellos with little melodic themes popping up all over from the winds and brass. And that is just the first movement.
There is some wonderful scoring for the bass instruments in various combinations of bass bassoon, bass trombone and the four strings basses as the foundation to the music. This is a modern piece of music that deserves to be heard again and we can only hope that other symphony orchestras around the country will program it in coming years.
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