Music

It started with a handful of players amid a sea of empty chairs. The vacant seats, laid out for the much larger forces needed later in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s all-Strauss program, lent an unplanned poignancy to the performance of Metamorphosen, a work written in the dying months of World War II. One could imagine this to be a lament for the countless numbers who died, symbolised by the unfilled places on stage. In fact, it was the loss of Germany’s cultural patrimony, through the destruction of opera houses and other institutions in Allied bombing raids, which particularly affected Strauss. Metamorphosen mourns the passing of a world to which he had devoted his life, both as conductor and composer.

Two years ago, at its last Melbourne appearance, the Australian World Orchestra (AWO) performed Gustav Mahler’s last completed symphony, the Ninth. Ninety minutes long, that one work was the programme. For its return last Wednesday night, the AWO upped the ante. It presented well over two hours of music, and two Mahler symphonies, at its one-night Mahlerfest, with the strapline ‘Audacious. Exhilarating. Limitless.’

What promised to be a memorable occasion on Friday evening – the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s appearance at the BBC Proms to conclude its European tour – descended into unseemly farce when a handful of agitators known as the Jewish Artists for Palestine staged a noisy protest and disrupted the concert.

Friday night’s Sydney Symphony treat at the Opera House’s Concert Hall was a sold-out affair. The audience sizzled with expectation at the prospect of hearing a ‘world celebrity’. Daniil Trifonov was in town ‘performing Rachmaninov’, as the informative program’s cover proclaimed. But which Rachmaninov? Well, it was Trifonov’s favourite among Rachmaninov’s four concertos: the Fourth.

The pairing of two Australian soloists – Siobhan Stagg (soprano) and Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano) – in top form with one of the world’s finest period music ensembles, and in an all-Mozart program, was always likely to be a winning concert combination, and so it proved to be. This second of two Melbourne concerts by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra during their current tour was delivered with consummate style to a delighted and near-capacity audience at the Melbourne Recital Hall.

One consequence of the popular success of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro (2023) may well be that it helps to reinforce the cultural significance of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony (Resurrection) for another generation. In the film we witness a faithful recreation of the final moments of Leonard Bernstein’s legendary performance of the Resurrection in Ely Cathedral in 1973.