August 2024

FOUR SEASONS RECOMPOSED / HIDDEN

THOUGHTS III

MOZART AND BRAHMS FAURÉ’S REQUIEM

ACKNOWLEDGING COUNTRY

In the first project of its kind in Australia, the MSO has developed a musical Acknowledgment of Country with music composed by Yorta Yorta composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, featuring Indigenous languages from across Victoria. Generously supported by Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and the Commonwealth Government through the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, the MSO is working in partnership with Short Black Opera and Indigenous language custodians who are generously sharing their cultural knowledge.

The Acknowledgement of Country allows us to pay our respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we perform in the language of that country and in the orchestral language of music.

Long Time Living Here

As a Yorta Yorta/Yuin composer the responsibility I carry to assist the MSO in delivering a respectful acknowledgement of country is a privilege which I take very seriously. I have a duty of care to my ancestors and to the ancestors on whose land the MSO works and performs.

As MSO continues to grow its knowledge and understanding of what it means to truly honour the First people of this land, the musical acknowledgment of country will serve to bring those on stage and those in the audience together in a moment of recognition as as we celebrate the longest continuing cultures in the world.

– Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO

Our musical Acknowledgment of Country, Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, is performed at MSO concerts.

MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Committed to shaping and serving the state it inhabits, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is Australia’s preeminent orchestra and a cornerstone of Victoria’s rich, cultural heritage.

Each year, the MSO and MSO Chorus present more than 180 public events across live performances, TV, radio and online broadcasts, and via its online concert hall, MSO.LIVE, engaging an audience of more than five million people in 56 countries. In 2024 the organisation will release its first two albums on the newly established MSO recording label.

With an international reputation for excellence, versatility and innovation, the MSO works with culturally diverse and First Nations artists to build community and deliver music to people across Melbourne, the state of Victoria and around the world.

In 2024, Jaime Martín leads the Orchestra for his third year as MSO Chief Conductor. Maestro Martín leads an Artistic Family that includes Principal Conductor Benjamin Northey, Cybec Assistant Conductor Leonard Weiss CF, MSO Chorus Director Warren Trevelyan-Jones, Composer in Residence Katy Abbott, Artist in Residence

Erin Helyard, MSO First Nations Creative Chair Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, Young Cybec Young Composer in Residence Naomi Dodd, and Artist in Association Christian Li.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the people of the Eastern Kulin Nations, on whose un‑ceded lands we honour the continuation of the oldest music practice in the world.

YOUR MSO

FIRST VIOLINS

Tair Khisambeev

Acting Associate Concertmaster

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Anne-Marie Johnson

Acting Assistant Concertmaster

David Horowicz#

Peter Edwards

Assistant Principal

Margaret Billson and the late Ted Billson#

Sarah Curro

Dr Harry Imber#

Peter Fellin

Deborah Goodall

Karla Hanna

Lorraine Hook

Kirstin Kenny

Eleanor Mancini

Anne Neil#

Mark Mogilevski

Michelle Ruffolo

Anna Skálová

Kathryn Taylor

SECOND VIOLINS

Matthew Tomkins

Principal

The Gross Foundation#

Monica Curro

Assistant Principal

Dr Mary Jane Gething AO#

Mary Allison

Isin Cakmakçioglu

Tiffany Cheng

Glenn Sedgwick#

Freya Franzen

Cong Gu

Newton Family in memory of Rae Rothfield#

Andrew Hall

Robert Macindoe

Isy Wasserman

Philippa West

Andrew Dudgeon AM#

Patrick Wong

Roger Young

Shane Buggle and Rosie Callanan#

VIOLAS

Christopher Moore

Principal

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Lauren Brigden

Katharine Brockman

Anthony Chataway

William Clark

Aidan Filshie

Gabrielle Halloran

Jenny Khafagi

Fiona Sargeant

CELLOS

David Berlin

Principal

Rachael Tobin

Associate Principal Anonymous#

Elina Faskhi

Assistant Principal

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Rohan de Korte

Andrew Dudgeon AM#

Sarah Morse

Rebecca Proietto

Peter T Kempen AM#

Angela Sargeant

Caleb Wong

Michelle Wood

Andrew and Judy Rogers#

DOUBLE BASSES

Jonathon Coco

Principal

Stephen Newton

Acting Associate Principal

Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser#

Rohan Dasika

Acting Assistant Principal

Benjamin Hanlon

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio#

Suzanne Lee

Learn more about our musicians on the MSO website. # Position supported by

FLUTES

Prudence Davis Principal

Jean Hadges#

Wendy Clarke Associate Principal

Sarah Beggs

PICCOLO

Andrew Macleod Principal

OBOES

Johannes Grosso Principal

Michael Pisani Acting Associate Principal

Ann Blackburn

COR ANGLAIS

Rachel Curkpatrick Acting Principal

CLARINETS

David Thomas Principal

Philip Arkinstall Associate Principal

Craig Hill

Rosemary and the late Douglas Meagher#

BASS CLARINET

Jonathan Craven Principal

BASSOONS

Jack Schiller

Principal

Dr Harry Imber#

Elise Millman

Associate Principal

Natasha Thomas

Patricia Nilsson and Dr Martin Tymms#

CONTRABASSOON

Brock Imison Principal

HORNS

Nicolas Fleury Principal

Margaret Jackson AC#

Saul Lewis Principal Third

The late Hon Michael Watt KC and Cecilie Hall#

Abbey Edlin The Hanlon Foundation#

Josiah Kop

Rachel Shaw

Gary McPherson#

TRUMPETS

Owen Morris Principal

Shane Hooton Associate Principal

Glenn Sedgwick#

Rosie Turner

John and Diana Frew#

TROMBONE

Richard Shirley

BASS TROMBONE

Michael Szabo Principal

TUBA

Timothy Buzbee Principal

TIMPANI

Matthew Thomas Principal

PERCUSSION

Shaun Trubiano Principal

John Arcaro

Tim and Lyn Edward#

Robert Cossom

Drs Rhyl Wade and Clem Gruen#

HARP

Yinuo Mu Principal

SCREEN

THEATRE PROJECTIONOUTDOO R EVENTS

EVENT MANAGEMENT

PERFORMANCE RECORDING

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

EVENT MANAGEMENT

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE RECORDING

PERFORMANCE RECORDING VIRTUAL R E A LITY

POST PRODUCTION

VIDEO PRODUCTION

THEATRE PROJECTION

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

VIDEO PRODUCTION

THEATRE PROJECTION

POST PRODUCTION

POST PRODUCTION EVENT MANAGEMENT

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

PERFORMANCE RECORDING LIVE ST R EAMING

VIDEO PRODUCTION

EVENT MA N AGEMENT

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

POST PRODUCTION

EVENT MANAGEMENT

We present your business at its best…

VIDEO PRODUCTION

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

POST PRODUCTION

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

VIDEO PRODUCTION

THEATRE PROJECTION

EVENT MANAGEMENT

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

MANAGEMENT CORPORATE PRODUCTION

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN PERFORMANCE RECORDING PROJECTION POST PRODUCTION EVENT MANAGEMENT

LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE RECORDING POST PRODUCTION

RECORDING VIDEO PRODUCTION LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN POST PRODUCTION

CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE THEATRE PROJECTION POST PRODUCTION EVENT MANAGEMENT CORPORATE COMMUNICATION VIDEO PRODUCTION LIVE EVENT MANAGEMENT CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE RECORDING VIDEO PRODUCTION THEATRE PROJECTION POST PERFORMANCE RECORDING VIDEO PRODUCTION LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN THEATRE PROJECTION POST PRODUCTION EVENT MANAGEMENT CORPORATE LIVE CAMERA TO SCREEN THEATRE PROJECTION POST PRODUCTION EVENT MANAGEMENT CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE RECORDING

LIVECAME R A TO SCREEN

CVP Events, Film & Television is Australia’s leading complete vision solutions company

Whether we’re making a television commercial or a piece of corporate communication, recording your performance, using multiple projectors to create a 60metre wide image, providing live to screen services at your concert or managing the entire event for you — at CVP — each component of the event is handled by staff who are specialists in their field.

We believe in excellence — it’s reflected in everything we do.

MAX RICHTER: THE FOUR SEASONS

RECOMPOSED

9–10 AUGUST

ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL

ARTISTS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Benjamin Northey conductor

Sophie Rowell violin

Sunny Kim vocalist

Andrew O’Connor bass-baritone

Pamela Rabe narrator

PROGRAM

KATY ABBOTT* Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe** [45']

– Interval –

MAX RICHTER The Four Seasons Recomposed [44']

*MSO Composer in Residence

**World premiere of an MSO Commission

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

Duration: 2 hours including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

BENJAMIN NORTHEY CONDUCTOR

Australian conductor Benjamin Northey is the Chief Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor—Learning and Engagement of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Northey studied conducting at Finland’s Sibelius Academy with Professors Leif Segerstam and Atso Almila and completed his studies at the Stockholm Royal College of Music with Jorma Panula in 2006.

Northey appears regularly as a guest conductor with all major Australian symphony orchestras, Opera Australia (La bohème, Turandot, L’elisir d’amore, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Carmen), New Zealand Opera (Sweeney Todd ) and the State Opera South Australia (La sonnambula, L’elisir d’amore, Les contes d’Hoffmann).

His international appearances include concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, the Malaysian Philharmonic and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

An Aria Awards, Air Music Awards, and Art Music Awards winner, he was voted Limelight Magazine’s Australian Artist of the Year in 2018. Northey’s many recordings can be found on ABC Classics.

In 2024, he conducts the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland and Christchurch Symphony Orchestras and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

SOPHIE ROWELL VIOLIN

Former Concertmaster of the MSO, Sophie Rowell has had an extensive performing career as a soloist, chamber musician and principal orchestral violinist both in Australia and abroad. She is currently the Artistic Director of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

After winning the ABC Young Performer’s Award in 2000, Sophie founded the Tankstream Quartet, which won string quartet competitions in Cremona and Osaka. Having studied in Germany with the Alban Berg Quartet, the quartet returned to Australia in 2006 when they were appointed to the Australian String Quartet. Since 2012 Sophie has traveled the world playing in principal violin positions with orchestras including the Scottish & Mahler Chamber Orchestras and the Vancouver, Sydney & Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, as well as participating in many chamber music festivals in Australia.

Sophie studied with Alice Waten in Sydney and participated in numerous master classes with musicians such as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Norbert Brainin (Amadeus Quartet) and Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet). She now teaches at the Australian National Academy of Music having previously taught at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide and the Australian Institute of Music in Sydney.

SUNNY KIM VOCALIST

Sunny Kim is a Korean-born vocalist, improviser, composer, and educator based in Australia. A two-time winner of Jazz People’s Magazine’s Reader’s Poll Awards in the Best Vocalist category (2012–13) and the recipient of the LIG Artist grant (2011), Sunny Kim has released five albums as a leader, Android Ascension (2008), Painter’s Eye (2012), The Shining Sea: Live at the Olympus Hall (2014), The Dream of the Earth (2016), and Tribute (2019), three of which have been nominated for the Korean Music Awards in the Best Jazz Record category.

After completing her studies in jazz at Boston’s New England Conservatory, Sunny went on to work closely with hundreds of improvising musicians including luminaries such as Roswell Rudd and Ben Monder. She has toured internationally and has performed at various venues around the world including Carnegie Hall.

Since 2007, Sunny has lectured at Hanyang University, Seoul Institute of the Arts, Soongshil University, and Dankuk University (Korea). A former Assistant Professor at Dong-Ah Institute for Media and Arts, Sunny currently lectures at the University of Melbourne in Jazz and Improvisation.

ANDREW O’CONNOR BASS-BARITONE

For more than a decade Perth-born Andrew O’Connor has maintained a busy freelance career encompassing opera, the concert platform, vocal chamber music, and the classroom. Praised for his ‘remarkable musicianship’ (Limelight Magazine) and ‘textured, fine-wine bass baritone’ ( Arts Hub) he appears regularly with many of Australia’s leading music organisations.

Formerly a permanent member of The Song Company from 2015–2019, he is a Lay Clerk at St Mary’s Cathedral, was an Associate Artist with Pacific Opera in 2019, winner of the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Prize in 2020. In 2022 he made his international debut with the VOCES8 Foundation and in 2023 joined the American Bach Soloists Academy in San Francisco.

In 2024 Andrew makes important solo debuts with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra singing Handel’s Messiah and this premiere with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Other projects include the entirety of Pinchgut Opera’s 2024 Season including the role of Achilla in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, three projects with The Song Company as part of their 40th Anniversary Season, further touring, recording, and creative development with AVÉ—Australian Vocal Ensemble, and numerous projects with Bach Akademie Australia, Salut! Baroque, Moorambilla Voices and more.

PAMELA RABE NARRATOR

Pamela is one of Australia’s most prolific and highly awarded actors. She last appeared with The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2021 narrating Melody Eötvös’ The Ruler of The Hive, which she premiered with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Notable musical collaborations include performing with the Kronos Quartet at the inaugural Womad Earthstation in 2012.

Her work in television includes The Secret Life of Us, Mercury and Wentworth, for which she won a 2018 Silver Logie award for Most Outstanding Actress and the 2015 AACTA award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama. Pamela has appeared in feature films including Sirens alongside Hugh Grant and Sam Neill, and The Well, for which she won the 1997 AFI, Stockholm Film Festival and Variety Club awards for Best Actress.

For her work in theatre and musicals, she has received 3 Helpmann Best Actress Awards for The Children, The Glass Menagerie and Grey Gardens, 8 Green Room Awards, a Sydney Critics’ Circle Award and a “Mo” Award. Pamela has also directed plays for the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company and the Malthouse Theatre.

KATY ABBOTT COMPOSER

Composer and Artist Mentor, Dr Katy Abbott illuminates and inspires the heart of us.

Katy’s work explores ‘connection’ and resonance with the intention of meaningfully impacting the daily lives of her audience. She’s especially curious about the audience–performer–composer dynamic. Her work looks at the macro (societal) human connection as well as the intimate (one-to-one connections within relationships, families, friendships, and connection to self).

As a musical master story-teller, Abbott’s compositions are performed, published and recorded around the world. She has five solo albums on ABC Classics and MOVE records and highly awarded for composition (including Paul Lowin Award for Composition (songcycle) and a 2-year Fellowship with Australian Council for the Arts in 2018.

An Educator and Mentor for 30 years, she has a holistic approach to her composing and Artist Mentoring. She is an Honorary Senior Fellow at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music where she also was Senior Lecturer in Composition. Katy founded The Artists’ Mentor: Illuminate. Challenge. Change in 2020 which supports mid-career, established artists and arts leaders, across disciplines, to build long-term, vibrant practices with capacity and impact.

MAUREEN JOHNSON LIBRETTIST

Maureen writes for joy and pleasure. A communications and engagement professional by day and a closet creative by night, Maureen writes both poetry and prose, relishing in the sound and rhythm of language and words. Dialogue, stories and the way people express themselves are a source of curiosity and creativity. Maureen jumped at the chance to collaborate with Katy on her Hidden Thoughts™ Series; to tell stories through music and narrative as equal mediums, rather than one supporting the other. In Hidden Thoughts II: Return to Sender, the writer and composer trawled through hundreds of letters, finding the individual and universal voices of Australians who were driven to write to refugees in detention. Following the success of this collaboration, Maureen joined Katy to consider the idea of awe, what it is and how it sits in our daily experiences, how it changes us if at all. Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe is a piece born of a truly “awesome” friendship—hours of walking the streets of Melbourne, exploring the shapes, sounds and stories.

PROGRAM NOTES

KATY ABBOTT

(b.1971)

Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe

Soloists

Sunny Kim vocalist

Andrew O’Connor bass-baritone

Pamela Rabe narrator

Dedicated to Kipling and Finnegan Abbott on the occasion of their 21st birthday (2024).

May you stumble over the sparkling glimmers and seek out the raw unearthing of awe in your lives—and experience and sense the ‘extraordinary’ in the everyday ho hum. Mum x

—Katy Abbott

I dedicate my contribution to this work to my children, Mabel and Zac, who are a constant source of inspiration, joy and wonder.

And to the lovely Pete, who finds awe in everything.

—Maureen Johnson

Hidden Thoughts III: Stories of Awe was commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as part of Katy Abbott’s position as 2024 Composer in Residence.

The composer and author write: This work tells a story. It’s not a linear narrative but rather a collection of stories, words and of course music that captures the idea, the feeling and the impacts of awe.

The structure of this piece was developed in part after a conversation with Professor Dacher Keltner, Head of Psychology at the University of California. Professor Keltner talks about the awe that we find in our everyday lives, referring to them

as the “eight wonders of life”. They are moral beauty which he describes as ‘other people’s courage, kindness, strength or overcoming’. Collective effervescence, the experience of being in a collective or group, a football crowd, a wedding, a protest; the ‘oceanic we’ he says. Nature; both the terrifying (earthquakes) and the everyday (the night sky), the arts; music and visual design and of course spiritual or religious, being close to birth or death. And finally, epiphanies such ‘philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, personal realisations, metaphysical ideas and the like, that transform life in an instant’.

As with all works in the Hidden Thoughts™ Series, the text comes from stories of anonymous friends and strangers, in this case via an anonymous online survey. The stories are oftentimes vast, rich and beautiful filled with landscapes and wild nature, some are heartbreaking and mystifying and others are very simple, tiny moments; the small purposeful movements of baby’s hand, a smile from a stranger, a dog’s joy as he bounds through a park. Perhaps you were one of the contributors!

Together with writer, friend and collaborator Maureen Johnson, the text was pulled from the many surveys to weave a narrative. We focussed on poignant parts of stories; the moments of awe. We also looked at the global voice, the common themes that emerged from the responses when we pulled back from details. Aside from finding the ordinary in the extraordinary, common themes included courage and connection—to ourselves, to each other, to animals or the world around us and the impacts of awe on our sense of time (standing still) and breath (being taken and held).

Sometimes, individual stories are relayed through narration or song, through the sounds, calls and chants but the essence of the stories and themes is also captured musically.

In the final movement, Juxtaposition, two melodies appear in canonic and layering form. They represent tiredness and hope.

The first theme, I’m So Tired In My Soul, is already known to the audience by then. It is included in the work to create a contrast to the stories of awe. It is also an acknowledgement of the impact of the last few years on all of us and the place of awe in what can often feel like a world of chaos and fear and bleakness.

The second theme is inherently simple yet hopeful, and the interweaving and layering of the two themes speak of the complexity and simplicity of awe. Of course, the two themes also refer to the experience of our own humanity, of how we connect to the physical, mysterious and beautiful world and people around us.

Awe is a gift available to those who notice it, who relish in it, who appreciate all that it brings and all that it offers. To accept the gift is to be transformed by it.

We hope to inspire you with your stories of awe today.

© Katy Abbott and Maureen Johnson, June 2024.

MAX RICHTER (b.1966)

The Four Seasons Recomposed

Spring I

Spring II

Spring III

Summer I

Summer II

Summer III

Autumn I

Autumn II

Autumn III

Winter I

Winter II

Winter III

Soloist

Sophie Rowell violin

Vivaldi knew the value of publishing his music, and his Four Seasons forms part of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (‘The Contest of Harmony and Invention’), Opus 8, which was published, using the new technology of engraved plates, in 1725 in Amsterdam. His musical rhetoric exquisitely depicts the seasons’ progress and annual rhythms of life, described also in sonnets (possibly written by him) that he affixed to the score.

Vivaldi also knew the value of not publishing certain works, understanding that anything in print was fair game for other composers to copy—Bach did just that with several of Vivaldi’s pieces. Baroque composers were accustomed to the notion of ‘parody’ in its original sense: composers might borrow music from their own or others’ instrumental music and set the words of, say, the mass to them.

Despite the digital electronic element, Vivaldi would, then, have been unsurprised and probably quite comfortable with Max Richter’s ‘recomposition’ of his most popular

work in 2012. The German-born British composer has a distinguished career in electro-acoustic work, including scores for the stage and screen, and the postminimalist aspect of his style makes for a fruitful point of contact between his music and that of the Baroque. But this is no mere arrangement or remix: as the composer has noted:

I wanted to open up the score on a note-by-note level, and working with an existing recording was like digging a mineshaft through an incredibly rich seam, discovering diamonds and not being able to pull them out. That became frustrating. I wanted to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence rewrite it, recomposing it in a literal way.

In the event, with quasi-minimalist repetition and dramatic elisions of Vivaldi’s music, Richter estimates he retained about one quarter of the original. He begins with a brief sound sculpture that sets the scene for Spring; in the first movement proper he plays with Vivaldi’s birdcalls over a new, slowmoving ostinato of magisterial chords. Similarly in the other two movements a phrase from the original is repeated and examined from different angles; Vivaldi’s nymphs and shepherds are omitted.

After a relatively straight version of the introduction, the first movement of Summer drives the ‘cuckoo’ motif relentlessly before Richter adds his own long cantilena. Richter captures the heat-struck lassitude of the second movement, and in the third adds new rhythmic emphases to Vivaldi’s stormy music.

Autumn I is full of subtle rhythmic displacements before the somnolent episode toward the end. The slow movement uses electronics to create a static, echoing sound-world. Vivaldi’s ‘hunting horns’ are absent from Autumn III, the music using the soloist’s first

material to decorate more slow-moving ostinatos.

Winter I is characterised by familiar material made strange by slight metrical irregularities. There is no crackling fire in the slow movement, where the violin sings the lonely melody against a frozen backdrop. Similarly, Richter dispenses with Vivaldi’s skaters while still creating a sense of movement through a winter landscape.

© Gordon Kerry 2017

MOZART AND BRAHMS

15 AUGUST

MELBOURNE TOWN HALL

ARTISTS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Jen Winley conductor

Jayson Gillham piano

PROGRAM

FAURÉ Suite from Masques et bergamasques [14']

MOZART Piano Concerto No.12 [26']

– Interval –

BRAHMS Symphony No.1 [45']

CONCERT EVENTS

ORGAN RECITAL

15 August at 6.30pm at Melbourne Town Hall.

Arrive early to enjoy a recital performed by Calvin Bowman on the mighty Grand Organ, free for ticket holders.

BRAHMS 11 Chorale Preludes Op. 122, No.1 ‘Mein Jesu, der du mich’

FAURÉ Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80: Sicilienne [arr. Organ]

FAURÉ Dolly Suite, Op. 56: Berceuse [arr. Organ]

BRAHMS Prelude and Fugue in G minor, WoO 10

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

Duration: 2 hours including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

JEN WINLEY CONDUCTOR

Jen Winley is the Associate Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Jen began her career in percussion and timpani working principally with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and regularly with Orchestra Victoria and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). She then spent several years as a classroom music educator and loves being able to combine her passions for music and education when working with young people.

Jen made her professional conducting debut in 2020 with several orchestras in Perth including WASO and the Perth Symphony Orchestra. Jen is a highly versatile conductor and enjoys working on a wide variety of projects. She has conducted WASO in mainstage concerts, Family, Education and Outreach projects, regional tours, Films in concert, and contemporary and recording projects. Jen is also proud to have conducted the WA Youth Orchestra since 2019.

In 2023, Jen made her debut as conductor with West Australian Opera and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, in addition to continued conducting engagements with WASO. 2024 sees Jen make her debut with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and her subscription concert debut with WASO.

Outside of music, Jen loves learning French and planning her next trip to Paris, and is obsessed with her little schnoodle Luna that she shares with her partner, WASO cellist, Nick Metcalfe.

JAYSON GILLHAM PIANO

Described as a ‘story-teller’ (Gramophone) and ‘the ideal romantic’ (Limelight), Australian-British pianist Jayson Gillham is internationally admired for his compelling performances and warm communicative style. After receiving numerous prizes from the leading piano competitions including the Leeds and Van Cliburn, it was Jayson’s win at the 2014 Montreal International Music Competition that brought him to international attention. His outstanding performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 was praised in the Canadian press as being played ‘with absorbing and relentless elegance.’

Performing at the highest level around the world, Gillham’s recent concerto highlights include performances with the London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, the Hallé, English Chamber Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Nashville Symphony, Wuhan Philharmonic, and Johannesburg Philharmonic. Jayson enjoys performing here in Australia regularly with the Melbourne, West Australian, Adelaide and Tasmania Symphony Orchestras. Conductors include the late Sir Jeffrey Tate, Sir Mark Elder, Asher Fisch, Johannes Fritzsch, Ludovic Morlot, Eivind Aadland, Michał Dworzynski, Arvo Volmer, Dmitri Matvienko, Christian Kluxen, Alexander Shelley, Nicholas Carter, Jessica Cottis, Dane Lam, Benjamin Northey, Joshua Weilerstein, Giordano Bellincampi and Giancarlo Guerrero.

In recital, Gillham has appeared at some of the world’s most prestigious venues including the Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Birmingham Town Hall, Saffron Hall, Royal Nottingham Concert Hall and the Barbican in the UK, Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Montreal’s Pollack Hall, the Steinway Hall in New York, and the major Australian recital venues including Sydney’s City Recital Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre.

PROGRAM NOTES

GABRIEL FAURÉ

(1845–1924)

Masques et Bergamasques – Suite, Op.112

I. Ouverture

II. Menuet

III. Gavotte

IV. Pastorale

Fauré is not usually thought of as a composer for the theatre. Indeed, there is a cartoon showing him literally weaving the score of his opera Pénélope (1913)—it took him so long to finish, in the time left over from his duties as director of the Paris Conservatoire, that he seemed to be adopting his heroine’s ruse. In fact, Fauré’s numerous plans for a full-scale lyric drama foundered on his inability to find a suitable libretto—like most French composers, he longed for a success in the theatre. He appeased this ‘lyric hunger’, as he explained in a letter to his friend Saint-Saëns, in incidental music for plays, ‘the only kind which suits my modest means’. His scores for plays include Caligula (1888), Shylock (1889) and Pelleas and Melisande, for a London production in 1898. The opera Pénélope was premiered in Monte Carlo; shortly after World War I ended, Fauré received a commission from the Prince of Monaco for the same theatre.

Fauré’s idea was to take up again the Fête galante theme he had already explored in several songs and choruses. In 1902 an entertainment of this sort using his music had been a great success in the Paris salon of Madeleine Lemaire. Fauré asked the librettist of Pénélope, René Fauchois, to write a lightweight, playful piece in the style of Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes. Fauchois’ own

description of the scenario makes clear that it was little more than a pretext:

Harlequin, Gilles and Columbine, the masques who often amused the court, in turn amuse themselves at being the spectators of a fête galante at Cythera; without knowing it, the gentlemen and ladies who applaud them give them the impromptu play of their petty coquetteries and their trivial talk.

The mock 18th-century atmosphere was reinforced by sets in the manner of the paintings of Watteau. The title was Fauré’s own idea, opposed for some reason by Fauchois. He took it from the Verlaine song he had memorably set in 1887, Clair de lune:

Your soul is a chosen landscape Bewitched by mummers and maskers [masques et bergamasques] Who play the lute and dance, almost Sad under their crazy fancy-dress.

An orchestrated version of this song is one of the eight numbers of Masques et Bergamasques, which also included the famous Pavane with chorus. The only numbers written especially in 1919 were the four which make up the ‘symphonic suite’ heard tonight, and of those, even the Ouverture is a reworking of the Intermezzo for orchestra Fauré had composed in 1868. Reynaldo Hahn wittily described this Ouverture as ‘Mozart imitating Fauré’.

The rather languid Menuet comes close to pastiche, in the view of JeanMichel Nectoux, the leading Fauré authority. He finds in the Gavotte, with its open gaiety and strong rhythms, an affinity with the music of Fauré’s friend Chabrier, and even with the Rigaudon from his pupil Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. (Nectoux has discovered Fauré’s original of this movement, too, in a piece from 1869.) By far the most striking and deeply felt movement is the Pastorale, which Fauré was surely right

to place last in the orchestral suite. It originally came near the beginning, and underlaid a conversation between the three commedia dell’arte characters, but it deserves to be heard on its own, for its distinctive harmonic progressions. It is Fauré’s last orchestral music, and has all the hallmarks of his late style.

© David Garrett (no date provided)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)

Piano Concerto No.12 in A, K414

I. Allegro

II. Andante

III. Allegretto

Soloist

Jayson Gillham piano

The ‘little’ A major concerto of Mozart —so-called to distinguish it from the A major concerto, K488—is held in particular affection by pianists who lean towards musicality over virtuosity. Benjamin Britten played it at the Aldeburgh Festival, and Sydney pianist Laurence Godfrey Smith, in his old age, told of his delight after discovering it by accident half-a-century before, while thumbing through some marked-down music in a London shop. The concerto contains little to gratify the showy kind of pianist; it appeals rather through the intensely personal tone of its gracious discourse—a tone called ‘Mozartian’ by those who know the composer’s work well. As Donald Tovey wrote, ‘it would be difficult to find another work of Mozart in which every single theme is so typical of his style’ (to which we may add: ‘even when he was quoting, consciously or unconsciously’).

This concerto belongs to a group of three, the first Mozart wrote in Vienna, designed for his subscription concerts of 1783. Mozart, as he pointed out to a

prospective publisher, wrote these three concertos (K413, K414, K415) in such a way that they could be performed without wind instruments: an option, however, which robs them of a great deal. By comparison with many of his concertos to follow (or even with the amazingly rich E flat Concerto K271, composed five years earlier, his most recent concerto for one solo piano), these new concertos are relatively undemanding for the listener, and Mozart explained why in a letter written to his father while composing them:

[They] are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult... There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.

The first movement begins with a theme based on nothing more than a procession from the tonic key to the dominant by rising arpeggio and falling scale, a commonplace device of the ‘style galant’, the elegant and decorative style featured by J.C. Bach. Mozart soon puts his personal stamp on the music, in the second subject, with its lilt and stress on the off-beat. To the listener familiar with the Symphony No.29 or the A major Piano Concerto K.488, this immediately says ‘Mozart in A major’. The recapitulation is reached in a way Mozart used in no other concerto—by a vigorous downward scale of the piano followed by a pause (which the interpreter may or may not choose to fill with a cadenza). As the main thematic material is resumed, the soloist makes more of the second subject than first time round.

The calm solemnity of the slow movement contains a lesson in music history. Based on a theme from an opera overture by Johann Christian Bach, it almost certainly represents Mozart’s tribute to his friend and

mentor, the ‘London’ Bach, who had died on 1 January, 1782. ‘What a loss to the musical world!’, wrote Mozart to his father. It also shows how Mozart took the gracious outlines of the ‘galant’ style, which J.C. Bach represented at its best, and filled them with a deeper and more personal emotion. Tovey perceptively suggests that Mozart’s harmonisation of Bach’s theme shows his ability to make the piano ‘sound like an organ’, an achievement his friends admired in his playing. (A previous use by Mozart of this tune, as the trio of a minuet, is a reminder that for Mozart ‘Andante’ and ‘Andantino’, which he also wrote on this movement, are not very slow tempos. Mozart wrote to his father ‘Please tell my sister that there is no adagio in any of these concertos—only andantes’.)

The unison second motif in the third movement Rondo turns out to be germinal; appearing first as a contrast to perkiness of the opening subject, it is developed in imitation and counterpoint, justifying Mozart’s comments about passages for the connoisseur.

Another Rondo in A major, K386, was apparently written for this concerto, and may have been its original finale. Mozart, it has been suggested, replaced it with the Rondo heard in this concert because he found it too similar to the first movement. The Rondo K386 was one of the Mozart manuscripts dismembered after his death. It was reconstructed in the 1930s by Alfred Einstein, and again, after more ‘bits’ had come to light, by Charles Mackerras and Paul Badura-Skoda in the 1960s. A very attractive piece, it confirms the view of the personal character of this concerto. The fact that Mozart composed two complete sets of cadenzas for the Concerto K414 shows that he kept an affection for it and continued to play it later in his career.

© David Garrett (no date provided)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)

Symphony No.1 in C minor, Op.68

I. Un poco sostenuto – Allegro

II. Andante sostenuto

III. Un poco allegretto e grazioso

IV. Adagio – Più andante – Allegro non troppo, ma con brio

The first symphony was a long time coming, largely as a result of Brahms’ paralysing stage-fright when contemplating genres in which the ‘giants’—especially Beethoven—had produced their masterpieces. That is not to say that Brahms had not wanted to compose symphonies, and in the early 1850s was persuaded by Robert and Clara Schumann to turn a D minor sonata for two pianos into such a work; the results have not survived. It was at this time, though, that he began making sketches for what would, eventually, become the first movement of the First Symphony. In 1862, Clara Schumann was surprised to receive a package from Brahms containing ‘the first movement of a symphony’. She wrote to Joseph Joachim that it was ‘rather strong … but full of wonderful beauties’ and noted that ‘the themes are treated with a mastery that is becoming more and more characteristic of him’. Despite the enthusiasm of such colleagues, however, the movement (at this stage it was only the Allegro section) remained an unfinished torso for well over a decade. The Symphony was only completed and first performed in 1876—the same year as the first production of the completed Ring cycle.

Its impact was such that conductor Hans von Bülow only half-jokingly referred to it as Beethoven’s Tenth. It is certainly Beethovenian in scale, and follows the blueprint of such works as Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies in tracing an epic journey from a state of

turbulent conflict to one of triumphant resolution.

Clara Schumann may have found the ideas in the 1862 sketch ‘strong’, but they were immeasurably strengthened when Brahms added the overwhelming slow introduction where, over the implacable pounding of the timpani, the full orchestra sounds a harmony that threatens to come apart under the force of its internal tension. That tension is not resolved by a contrasting chirpy Allegro: the remainder of the movement continues to depict a compelling, but abstract, drama of musical processes in Brahms’ now fully-formed orchestral sound.

The Andante shows an equally Brahmsian, if completely different, sound world. After the confused alarms of the previous movement, the rhetoric is much more subdued, and the scoring lighter, allowing for brief, sylvan wind solos and passages of lush string writing. But the retreat from the Romantic Sturm und Drang of the previous movement is by no means complete, and the music is occasionally taken over in an impassioned outburst. The closing section of the movement, though, is quietly gleaming, with a violin solo and the soft wind chords with which Brahms often concludes a piece. Brahms scholar Karl Geiringer writes that the Allegretto (not a conventional scherzo) ‘seems to smile through its tears’, though it too has moments of frank emotionalism. Conductor Hermann Levi felt that the inner movements were serenade-like, but as such they provide respite between the two, titanic outer movements.

Following the Beethovenian model meant that Brahms had to create a finale that balanced if not outweighed the opening movement. Brahms’ solution was essentially that of Beethoven in the finale of the Ninth Symphony—though not, of course, using voices: both begin

with seemingly unrelated passages that return to a state of uncertainty and move through various musical fields before discovering the thematic centre of the piece. Brahms begins with a sombre Adagio introduction that, like the first movement’s, features harmony that moves almost painfully from chord to nearby chord. This gives rise to fragmentary, more troubled music, which in turn is interrupted by a long horn melody; this tune had personal significance for Brahms, in that he wrote it out, with some homemade verse, on a card sent to Clara Schumann when they were estranged. It is joined by the trombones (making their first appearance in the work), that suggests a sudden view of a spacious landscape. Only now does Brahms bring in his theme, a piece of pure and simple diatonicism.

Brahms, who never suffered fools, would snap at people who noted the similarity of the theme to Beethoven’s ‘Freude’ tune: ‘Any jackass can see that!’ And of course it may be a Beethovenian tune but its scoring, and the development to which it is subjected, are purely and masterfully Brahmsian.

© Gordon Kerry 2015

FAURÉ’S REQUIEM

29–31 AUGUST

ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE, HAMER HALL

ARTISTS

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Lawrence Renes conductor

Siobhan Stagg soprano

Roderick Williams baritone

MSO Chorus

Warren Trevelyan-Jones chorus director

PROGRAM

ELENA KATS-CHERNIN Mythic [11']

SIBELIUS Symphony No.7 [22']

– Interval –

FAURÉ Requiem [38']

CONCERT EVENTS

PRE-CONCERT TALK

Want to learn more about the music being performed? Arrive early for an informative and entertaining pre-concert talk with Taj Aldeeb.

29 August at 6.45pm in the Stalls Foyer on Level 2 at Hamer Hall.

31 August at 1.15pm in the Stalls Foyer on Level 2 at Hamer Hall.

For a list of musicians performing in this concert, please visit mso.com.au/musicians

Duration: 1 hour and 40 minutes including interval. Timings listed are approximate.

LAWRENCE RENES CONDUCTOR

Dutch-Maltese conductor Lawrence Renes has garnered acclaim in both operatic and symphonic realms for his remarkable talent in balancing orchestra and singers, delivering performances brimming with passion, nuance, and style.

The 23/24 season takes Lawrence Renes around the world, with engagements with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hangzhou Philharmonic, Orchestra Filarmonica del Teatro Regio di Torino, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and the Auckland Philharmonic.

Formerly Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera, his repertoire there ranged from Mozart through to the 21st century. An energetic champion of contemporary repertoire, he is particularly associated with the music of John Adams (having conducted productions of Nixon in China at San Francisco Opera and Doctor Atomic at both English National Opera and De Nederlandse Opera and orchestral works with the London and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra) but also with George Benjamin, Mark Anthony Turnage, Guillaume Connesson and Robin de Raaff.

SIOBHAN STAGG SOPRANO

Siobhan Stagg was an ensemble member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 2013–19, where her roles ranged from Pamina in Die Zauberflöte to Waldvogel and Woglinde in The Ring Cycle. Elsewhere, she has sung the title roles of Cendrillon (Lyric Opera of Chicago); Pamina (Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin); Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro (Covent Garden, Komische Oper Berlin), Sophie om Der Rosenkavalier (Opernhaus Zurich, Staatsoper Berlin); Mélisande (Opera de Dijon), Gilda in Rigoletto (Hamburgische Staatsoper); Najade in Ariadne auf Naxos (Bayerische Staatsoper), Morganain Alcina (Grand Théâtre de Genève) and Eritea in Eliogabolo (Opernhaus Zurich).

In concert, Siobhan revisits her relationship with Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks for Schubert’s G Major Mass conducted by Riccardo Muti; opens the season with Gürzenich Orchester Köln with François-Xavier Roth in Mahler’s Symphony No.4; embarks on a multi-concert tour with Pygmalion Ensemble in Mendelssohn’s Elijah; makes her debut with Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in Fauré’s Requiem and returns to Australia for multiple solo recitals across the country and solo collaborations with the Melbourne and Queensland Symphony Orchestras.

RODERICK

WILLIAMS BARITONE

Roderick Williams is one of the most sought-after baritones of his generation with a wide repertoire spanning baroque to contemporary. He enjoys relationships with all the major UK and European opera houses and performs regularly with leading conductors and orchestras throughout the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. Festival appearances include the BBC Proms, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Melbourne. As a recitalist he appears regularly at venues including the Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw and Musikverein and at song festivals including Leeds Lieder, Oxford International Song and Ludlow English Song.

Roderick was awarded an OBE in June 2017 and was Artist in Residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra from 2020–22, Artist in Residence at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival and Singer in Residence at Music in the Round. He was also one of the featured soloists at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023. Also a composer, he won Best Choral Composition at the British Composer Awards in 2016 and from 2022/23 he holds the position of Composer in Association of the BBC Singers.

MSO CHORUS

For more than 50 years the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus has been the unstinting voice of the Orchestra’s choral repertoire. The MSO Chorus sings with the finest conductors including Sir Andrew Davis, Edward Gardner, Mark Wigglesworth, Bernard Labadie, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Manfred Honeck, Xian Zhang and Nodoko Okisawa, and is committed to developing and performing new Australian and international choral repertoire.

Commissions include Brett Dean’s Katz und Spatz, Ross Edwards’ Mountain Chant, and Paul Stanhope’s Exile Lamentations. Recordings by the MSO Chorus have received critical acclaim. It has performed across Brazil and at the Cultura Inglese Festival in Sao Paolo, with The Australian Ballet, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, at the AFL Grand Final and at the Anzac Day commemorative ceremonies.

The MSO Chorus is always welcoming new members. If you would like to audition, please visit mso.com.au/chorus for more information.

WARREN TREVELYAN-JONES CHORUS

DIRECTOR

Warren Trevelyan-Jones is regarded as one of the leading choral conductors and choir trainers in Australia. He is Head of Music at St James’, King Street, Sydney, a position he has held since relocating to Australia in 2008. Under his leadership, The Choir of St James’ has gained a highprofile international reputation through its regular choral services, orchestral masses, concert series and a regular program of recording and both interstate and international touring.

Warren has had an extensive singing career as a soloist and ensemble singer in Europe, including nine years in the Choir of Westminster Abbey and regular work with the Gabrieli Consort, Collegium Vocale (Ghent), the Taverner Consort, The Kings Consort, Dunedin Consort, The Sixteen and the Tallis Scholars.

He is also a co-founder of The Consort of Melbourne and, in 2001 with Dr Michael Noone, founded the ‘Gramophone’ award-winning group Ensemble Plus Ultra. In September 2017 he was appointed Chorus Director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and has recently been appointed Chorus Master of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. He is also an experienced singing teacher and qualified music therapist.

MSO CHORUS PERFORMING IN THIS CONCERT

SOPRANO

Shirin Albert

Philippa Allen

Emma Anvari

Julie Arblaster

Helena Balazs

Giselle Baulch

Anne-Marie Brownhill

Eva Butcher

Aliz Cole

Clarissa Dodawec

Laura Fahey

Rita Fitzgerald

Catherine Folley

Susan Fone

Carolyn Francis

Nicole Free

Karina Gough

Juliana Hassett

Penny Huggett

Gina Humphries

Gwen Kennelly

Ingrid Kirchner

Theresa Lam

Natasha Lambie

Judy Longbottom

Caitlin Noble

Amanda Powell

Tanja Redl

Jo Robin

Jillian Samuels

Fiona Seers

Jemima Sim

Elizabeth Tindall

ALTO

Judy Anderson

Ruth Anderson

Margaret Arnold

Tes Benton

Marie Connett

Nicola Eveleigh

Dionysia Evitaputri

Lisa Faulks

Jill Giese

Natasha Godfrey

Debbie Griffiths

Sophia Gyger

Ros Harbison

Helen Hill

Yvonne Ho

Julie Lotherington

Helen MacLean

Rosemary McKelvie

Charlotte Midson

Penelope Monger

Nicole Paterson

Alison Ralph

Annie Runnalls

Julienne Seal

Helen Staindl

Libby Timcke

TENOR

Adam Birch

Kent Borchard

Steve Burnett

Allan Chiang

James Dal-Ben

Jose Diaz

James Dipnall

Simon Gaites

Lyndon Horsburgh

Fergus Inder

Michael Mobach

Jean-Francois Ravat

Linton Roe

Robert Simpson

Cameron Tait

Brad Warburton

Elliott Westbury

Stephen Wood

BASS

Maurice Amor

David Bennett

Roger Dargaville

Ted Davies

Michael Gough

Elliott Gyger

Andrew Ham

Andrew Hibbard

John Hunt

Gary Levy

Vern O’Hara

Douglas Proctor

Stephen Pyk

Caleb Triscari

Correct as of 1 August 2024.

PROGRAM NOTES

ELENA KATS-CHERNIN (born

1957)

Mythic

Elena Kats-Chernin was born in the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent. In 1975, she and her family emigrated from the Soviet Union to Australia. She studied composition with Richard Toop, graduating in 1980, and then studied with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover, West Germany, with the assistance of a DAAD Fellowship.

While in Europe she became active in theatre and ballet, composing for state theatres in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg and Bochum. Her music attracted the attention of the Ensemble Modern and in 1993 she wrote her breakthrough work Clocks for them. It has since been performed around the world, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, the USA and Australia.

Kats-Chernin remained in Germany for 13 years, returning to Australia in 1994. Since her return, she has written two operas, two piano concertos and works for many performers and ensembles, including The Song Company, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Evelyn Glennie, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony and also for the ‘Deep Sea Dreaming’ segment of the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games. In 1996 she received the Jean Bogan Award for her solo piano piece Charleston Noir and the Sounds Australian Award for Cadences, Deviations and Scarlatti. Her collaboration with choreographer Meryl Tankard, Wild Swans, was premiered by the Australian Ballet last year in its Sydney and Melbourne seasons and earned the composer the 2004 Green

Room Award in the Original Music for Dance category.

Recently, Kats-Chernin has received an Ian Potter Foundation Commission to write a piece for the Macquarie Trio and soprano. She has also been awarded a two year Fellowship from the Australia Council for 2004–05.

Three portrait CDs of her music have been released so far (Clocks, ABC Classics, Unceremonious Processions, Wergo, and Purple Black & Blues, Tall Poppies).

The composer writes:

A few years after my return to Australia, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra commissioned me to write a lively orchestral work that they could premiere and play on tour. The resulting piece, Heaven Is Closed, is a quick, energetic, rhythmically driven work. Thus, when the Orchestra asked me for a new piece, my instinct was to write something totally different. It grew out of a passacaglia-like chordal progession which had grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I wanted to attempt a direction I had not explored previously, and that was to stay in a slow, dark mood for a lengthy period and to see where that took me. Eventually it grew into a kind of a hymn with variations, sometimes almost Romantic, that made extensive use of the Orchestra’s brass section. The title Mythic refers to the mental image I had of musically entering into a large, mythical cave.

For the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, I wrote a work called Deep Sea Dreaming which was very much about Sydney and the sea. For this work, which will be premiered at the time of the Athens 2004 Olympics, I decided to reflect on the Olympics in a more internal way. It seems that so much has changed and so dramatically since those innocent days of the 2000 Olympics.

© Elena Kats-Chernin 2004

JEAN SIBELIUS

(1865–1957)

Symphony No.7 in C, Op.105 in one movement

In 1907, Jean Sibelius met Gustav Mahler in Helsinki. During their conversation, Sibelius that the essence of symphonic composition was a ‘severity of style and the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the motifs’. Mahler’s famous retort was, ‘No! The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ Indeed, Mahler’s symphonies become progressively more expansive, while Sibelius’, broadly speaking, become increasingly compressed and economical, culminating in the single-movement, 22-minute Seventh Symphony composed in 1924.

While Sibelius and Mahler both explored questions of existence, Sibelius expresses his world view through an increasing sense of unity, where Mahler’s theme is the broken nature of human experience. In this respect, Sibelius’ music is much closer to that of Anton Bruckner.

As a student in Vienna in 1890 Sibelius heard the Third Symphony of Bruckner, whom he declared ‘the greatest living composer’. From Bruckner, Sibelius learnt about structuring orchestral music on a large scale and the use of ostinati, or repeated rhythmic patterns. While he was in Vienna, paradoxically, Sibelius also became more and more interested in the folk history of his native country. A member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, Sibelius had had little contact with Finnish literature and mythology until his engagement to Aino Järnefelt, whose family were very pro-Finnish, in the same year. In the collection of myths and legends known as the Kalevala, Sibelius found great inspiration: the stories themselves fired his imagination in works such as The Swan of Tuonela, and the diction of the

poetry found its way into his rhythmic and melodic writing.

Sibelius’ most obviously nationalistic works are those based on the Kalevala and the celebrated Finlandia, written at a time of severe Russian repression. By the time of the last three symphonies and the tone poem Tapiola, Sibelius’ interest in mythology seems less to do with simple nationalism than with a nature-based mysticism. Since 1904 Sibelius and his family had lived among the conifers and lakes of rural Finland, some 40 kilometres from Helsinki. ‘Here,’ said Sibelius, ‘the silence speaks.’ And through his music it spoke of the cosmos.

This nowhere truer than in the Seventh Symphony, which, as Donald Tovey said of Beethoven’s Eighth, is ‘tiny but vast’. It was to have been a three-movement piece culminating in a ‘Hellenic’ rondo, though what we hear is decidely more Nordic than Greek. Having decided on the one-movement form, Sibelius himself was diffident about calling it a symphony at first, preferring ‘Symphonic Fantasia’ which also suggests some extra-musical intention. In some respects, it is tempting to see the piece as a symphony in miniature, and we can isolate elements which correspond to a Classical symphony’s exposition, development and recapitulation of themes, as well as sections which stand in for slow introduction, scherzo and so on. But the measure of Sibelius’ genius and craft is that it is almost impossible to tell where one section ends and another begins, and his technique, termed ‘rotational form’ by one writer, of exactly repeating thematic material gives the music a sense of potentially endless invention.

There are, nonetheless, a few signposts. The piece begins slowly with a simple, unaccompanied rising scale which is topped by an unexpected chord. The ensuing section is dominated by ‘blurred’ chords and short motifs

(notably from the woodwinds) as the music gradually gains momentum for the next four or so minutes. A spacious passage for divided strings introduces the main theme of the work, a majestic and extended melody for trombone. This gives way, imperceptibly yet again, to a kind of scherzo, dominated by terse rhythmic fragments passed back and forth from woodwinds to strings; suddenly there appears an oceanic swell in the lower strings above which the trombone theme returns in the minor mode. This galvanising moment marks the halfway point of the symphony. There follows a section which sounds like new material but is in fact based on transformations of what has gone before, and which gradually morphs into another scherzo-like section, before a third statement of the trombone theme. The blurred harmonies of the opening dominate the work’s last pages: even the final C major chord is not achieved without difficulty.

English composer Robert Simpson once wrote that Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony ‘is like a great planet in orbit, its movement vast, inexorable, seemingly imperceptible to its inhabitants.’ As it happens, a version of the trombone melody appears in Sibelius’ sketch for another, unfinished work, labelled ‘Where the stars dwell’, but even without that ‘clue’ it is hard not to hear this work as cosmic in its endlessly changing details and underlying unity.

Gordon Kerry © 2002

GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845–1924)

Requiem, Op.48

I. Introit and Kyrie

II. Offertorium

III. Sanctus

IV. Pie Jesu

V. Agnus Dei

VI. Libera me

VII. In paradisum

Soloists

Siobhan Stagg soprano

Roderick Williams baritone

Fauré’s Requiem is his one widely popular work, and indeed the only one of his larger-scale works to have found a secure place in the repertory. This is certainly not because of any lack of merit in his other compositions, but their highly civilised, rather private style makes it unlikely they will ever have wide appeal.

Fauré stood somewhat apart from the musical partisanship of his day— independent of the German tendencies of César Franck and his followers, and of the ‘impressionism’ of the Debussyites. He nevertheless earned wide respect and became Director of the Paris Conservatoire (1905–1920). Ravel was the most famous of his pupils.

The Requiem, first performed in 1888 at a funeral in the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, is a comparatively early work which reflects and sums up many of the features of its composer’s early style. It makes a memorable impression of serenity and contemplation, and has been praised by many commentators as highly appropriate to the Mass for the Dead.

It has been said that Fauré’s Requiem is suited to liturgical use rather than concert performance. But it is by and large in the concert hall that it has become known, and special permission

had to be obtained from the Church for it to be performed at Fauré’s own funeral. This is because of Fauré’s unconventional choice of liturgical texts—he omits the Dies Irae, except for the Pie Jesu, and adds two movements whose words are taken from the order for Burial: the Libera me (also set by Verdi in his Requiem) and the In Paradisum. It has been suggested that Fauré chose his texts to give greater prominence to the word requiem (rest).

Fauré’s father died in 1885. Then his mother died on New Year’s Eve 188788, and it may have been this event which prompted him to complete the Agnus Dei, Sanctus, and In Paradisum, which, together with other movements of the original version, were the first performed. The most dramatic part of the work, the Libera me was composed much earlier (in 1877), but added later—it is the only part which contains reference to the Day of Judgement.

There has been considerable discussion as to whether Fauré’s Requiem is more pagan than Christian in tone. It has been called (wrongly) ‘a Requiem without the Last Judgement’, and one critic has gone so far as to describe it as ‘a paradisiacal imagining, with no trace of torment or doubt, scarcely even of mourning’. This goes too far, but Fauré, though a church organist (at the Madeleine), was more drawn to Greek stoical ideals of contemplation and resignation than to the Christian sense of sin, judgement and hope for the afterlife. His is the unperturbed vision, says biographer Norman Suckling, ‘of one whose attention was just then fixed on death, since it was then that he had lost his parents’.

The musical style of the Requiem shows the influence on Fauré of his training at the École Niedermeier, founded to train organists and choir masters. This school promoted the study of the masters of church music of the past, and even of the ecclesiastical modes used in

Gregorian chant. This musical source is evident throughout the Requiem, most strikingly in the monotoned chant of the solo baritone in the Hostias. These sober passages are contrasted with long phrases of sinuous melodic curve, such as the themes of the Domine, Pie Jesu, Libera me and In Paradisum. The originality of the melodic outline sets Fauré’s Requiem apart from the sacred works of Gounod, which Fauré admired and which influenced his early sacred compositions.

Fauré’s great restraint is particularly evident in his orchestration. Several of the pieces which constitute the Requiem were first conceived as choruses with organ, and even in the final version the organ, with double basses, plays a kind of continuo role.

The versions of Fauré’s Requiem

As performed in January 1888, the first version consisted of Introit and Kyrie, Sanctus, Pie Jesu, Agnus Dei and In Paradisum. The choir and treble soloist (in the Pie Jesu) were accompanied by a small orchestra: divided violas and cellos, double basses, harp, organ, and one solo violin in the Sanctus, playing unmuted an octave higher than in the published version of 1900.

In June 1889 Fauré completed the Offertorium, and in 1891 added the Libera me of 1877, with baritone soloist and rescored for an orchestra including trombones. Adding horns and trumpets, and violins in the In Paradisum, this expanded second version of the Requiem was first performed at the Madeleine on 21 January 1893.

Fauré seems then to have given in to his publishers’ suggestion to expand the orchestra still further for the third (concert) version first performed in 1900 at the Trocadéro, and published the same year by Hamelle. The idea was to make the Requiem more suitable for concert performance; it is not certain

whether Fauré or one of his pupils adapted the orchestration. The added parts for woodwinds and violins double other instruments.

As Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux points out, the version heard tonight, though not the composer’s first idea, was approved by him. Thus there are two equally valid performing traditions for the Fauré Requiem: one stressing its liturgical purpose, the other more symphonic in scale and making the work a quieter example of the tradition of sacred works with orchestra to which the masses of Gounod and Saint-Saëns also belong.

© David Garrett 1998

SUPPORTERS

MSO PATRON

Her Excellency Professor, the Honourable

Margaret Gardner AC, Governor of Victoria

CHAIRMAN’S CIRCLE

The Gandel Foundation

The Gross Foundation

Besen Family Foundation

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio

Harold Mitchell Foundation

Lady Primrose Potter AC CMRI

Cybec Foundation

The Pratt Foundation

The Ullmer Family Foundation

Anonymous (1)

ARTIST CHAIR BENEFACTORS

Chief Conductor Chair Jaime Martín

Supported in memory of Eva and Marc Besen

Concertmaster Chair

David Li AM and Angela Li

Cybec Assistant Conductor Chair

Leonard Weiss CF

Cybec Foundation

Acting Associate Concertmaster

Tair Khisambeev

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio

Cybec Young Composer in Residence

Naomi Dodd

Cybec Foundation

PROGRAM BENEFACTORS

Now & Forever Fund: International

Engagement Gandel Foundation

Cybec 21st Century Australian

Composers Program Cybec Foundation

First Nations Emerging Artist Program

The Ullmer Family Foundation

East meets West The Li Family Trust

Community and Public Programs

AWM Electrical, City of Melbourne, Crown Resorts Foundation, Packer Family Foundation

MSO Live Online and MSO Schools

Crown Resorts Foundation, Packer Family Foundation

Student Subsidy Program Anonymous

MSO Academy Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio, Mary Armour, Christopher Robinson in memory of Joan P Robinson

Jams in Schools Melbourne Airport, Department of Education Victoria, through the Strategic Partnerships Program, AWM Electrical, Jean Hadges, Hume City Council, Marian and EH Flack Trust, and Flora and Frank Leith Trust.

Regional Touring AWM Electrical, Creative Victoria, Freemasons Foundation

Victoria, Robert Salzer Foundation, Sir Andrew and Lady Fairley Foundation

Sidney Myer Free Concerts Sidney Myer

MSO Trust Fund and the University of Melbourne, City of Melbourne Event Partnerships Program

PLATINUM PATRONS $100,000+

AWM Electrical

Besen Family Foundation

The Gross Foundation

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio

David Li AM and Angela Li

Lady Primrose Potter AC

Anonymous (1)

VIRTUOSO PATRONS $50,000+

Jolene S Coultas

Dr Harry Imber

Margaret Jackson AC

Packer Family Foundation

The Ullmer Family Foundation

Anonymous (1)

IMPRESARIO PATRONS $20,000+

H Bentley

Shane Buggle and Rosie Callanan

The Hogan Family Foundation

Elizabeth Proust AO and Brian Lawrence

Lady Marigold Southey AC

The Sun Foundation

Gai and David Taylor

Weis Family

The Yulgilbar Foundation

Anonymous (2)

MAESTRO PATRONS $10,000+

Mark and Christine Armour

John and Lorraine Bates

Margaret Billson and the late Ted Billson

Jannie Brown

Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM

Ken Ong Chong OAM

Miss Ann Darby in memory of Leslie J. Darby

Mary Davidson and the late Frederick Davidson AM

Andrew Dudgeon AM

Val Dyke

Jaan Enden

Kim and Robert Gearon

Dr Mary-Jane H Gething AO

Hanlon Foundation

David Horowicz

Peter Lovell

Dr Ian Manning

Maestro Jaime Martín

Rosemary and the late Douglas Meagher

Farrel and Wendy Meltzer

Paul Noonan

Ian and Jeannie Paterson

Hieu Pham and Graeme Campbell

Janet Matton AM & Robin Rowe

Liliane Rusek and Alexander Ushakoff

Glenn Sedgwick

Athalie Williams and Tim Danielson

Lyn Williams AM

PRINCIPAL PATRONS $5,000+

The Aranday Foundation

Mary Armour

Alexandra Baker

Barbara Bell in memory of Elsa Bell

Bodhi Education Fund

Julia and Jim Breen

Nigel and Sheena Broughton

Janet Chauvel and the late Dr Richard Chauvel

John Coppock OAM and Lyn Coppock

Cuming Bequest

The Dimmick Charitable Trust

Tim and Lyn Edward

Bill Fleming

John and Diana Frew

Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser

Carrillo Gantner AC and Ziyin Gantner

Geelong Friends of the MSO

Dr Rhyl Wade and Dr Clem Gruen

Cecilie Hall and the late Hon Michael Watt KC

Louis J Hamon OAM

Dr Keith Higgins and Dr Jane Joshi

Geoff and Denise Illing

Dr Alastair Jackson AM

John Jones

Merv Keehn and Sue Harlow

Peter T Kempen AM

Suzanne Kirkham

Lucas Family Foundation

Dr Jane Mackenzie

Dr Isabel McLean

Gary McPherson

The Mercer Family Foundation

Anne Neil in memory of Murray A. Neil

Newton Family in memory of Rae Rothfield

Jan and Keith Richards

Dr Sam Ricketson and Dr Rosemary Ayton

Andrew and Judy Rogers

Guy Ross

Kate and Stephen Shelmerdine Foundation

Helen Silver AO and Harrison Young

Brain Snape AM

Dr Michael Soon

P & E Turner

Mary Waldron

Janet Whiting AM and Phil Lukies

Dawna Wright and Peter Riedel

Igor Zambelli Anonymous (2)

ASSOCIATE PATRONS $2,500+

Margaret and Barry Amond

Carolyn Baker

Marlyn Bancroft and Peter Bancroft OAM

Janet H Bell

Alan and Dr Jennifer Breschkin

Dr John Brookes and Dr Lucy Hanlon

Lynne Burgess

Dr Lynda Campbell

Oliver Carton

Sage Foundation

Kaye Cleary

Leo de Lange

Sandra Dent

Sophie E Dougall in memory of Libby Harold

Rodney Dux

Diane and Stephen Fisher

Alex Forrest

Steele and Belinda Foster

Barry Fradkin OAM and Dr Pam Fradkin

Anthony Garvey and Estelle O’Callaghan

Janette Gill

R Goldberg and Family

Goldschlager Family Charitable

Foundation

Colin Golvan AM KC and Dr Deborah Golvan

Charles & Cornelia Goode Foundation

Jennifer Gorog

Miss Catherine Gray

Marshall Grosby and Margie Bromilow

Mr Ian Kennedy AM & Dr Sandra Hacker AO

Susan and Gary Hearst

Gillian Hund OAM and Michael Hund

Paul and Amy Jasper

Sandy Jenkins

Melissa Tonkin & George Kokkinos

Dr Jenny Lewis

David R Lloyd

Carolynne Marks

Margaret and John Mason OAM

Ian McDonald

Dr Paul Nisselle AM

Simon O’Brien

Roger Parker and Ruth Parker

Alan and Dorothy Pattison

Ruth and Ralph Renard

James Ring

Tom and Elizabeth Romanowski

Dr Ronald and Elizabeth Rosanove

Christopher Menz and Peter Rose

Marshall Segan in memory of Berek Segan

OBE AM and Marysia Segan

Jeffrey Sher KC and Diana Sher OAM

Steinicke Family

Jenny Tatchell

Christina Turner

Shirley and Jeffrey Zajac

Anonymous (5)

PLAYER PATRONS ($1,000+)

Dr Sally Adams

Jessica Agoston Cleary

Helena Anderson

Margaret Astbury

Geoffrey and Vivienne Baker

Robin Batterham

Justine Battistella

Michael Bowles & Alma Gill

Allen and Kathryn Bloom

Richard Bolitho

Joyce Bown

Elizabeth Brown

Stuart Brown

Suzie Brown OAM and the late Harvey Brown

Roger and Coll Buckle

Jill and Christopher Buckley

Dr Robin Burns and Dr Roger Douglas

Shayna Burns

Ronald and Kate Burnstein

Daniel Bushaway and Tess Hamilton

Peter A Caldwell

Alexandra Champion de Crespigny

Joshua Chye

Breen Creighton and Elsbeth Hadenfeldt

Mrs Nola Daley

Panch Das and Laurel Young-Das

Caroline Davies

Michael Davies and Drina Staples

Rick and Sue Deering

John and Anne Duncan

Jane Edmanson OAM

Grant Fisher and Helen Bird

Chris Freelance

Applebay Pty Ltd

David H and Esther Frenkiel

Mary Gaidzkar

David I Gibbs AM and Susie O’Neill

Sonia Gilderdale

Dr Celia Godfrey

Dr Marged Goode

Hilary Hall, in memory of Wilma Collie

David Hardy

Tilda and the late Brian Haughney

Cathy Henry

Gwenda Henry

Anthony and Karen Ho

Rod Home

Lorraine Hook

Doug Hooley

Katherine Horwood

Penelope Hughes

Jordan Janssen

Shyama Jayaswal

Basil and Rita Jenkins

Emma Johnson

Sue Johnston

Angela Kayser

Drs Bruce and Natalie Kellett

Anne and Leonard Kennedy

Akira Kikkawa

Dr Judith Kinnear

Dr Richard Knafelc and Mr Grevis Beard

Tim Knaggs

Professor David Knowles and Dr Anne McLachlan

Dr Jerry Koliha and Marlene Krelle

Jane Kunstler

Ann Lahore

Kerry Landman

Janet and Ross Lapworth

Bryan Lawrence

Phil Lewis

Dr Kin Liu

Andrew Lockwood

Elizabeth H Loftus

Chris and Anna Long

Wayne McDonald and Kay Schroer

Lois McKay

Lesley McMullin Foundation

Dr Eric Meadows

Ian Merrylees

Sylvia Miller

Ian Morrey and Geoffrey Minter

Anthony and Anna Morton

Barry and Diane Mowszowski

Laurence O’Keefe and Christopher James

George Pappas AO, in memory of Jillian Pappas

Susan Pelka

Ian Penboss

Kerryn Pratchett

Peter Priest

John Prokupets

Eli and Lorraine Raskin

Professor Charles Qin OAM and Kate Ritchie

Michael Riordan and Geoffrey Bush

Cathy Rogers OAM and Dr Peter Rogers AM

Marie Rowland

Jan Ryan

Viorica Samson

Martin and Susan Shirley

P Shore

Janet and Alex Starr

Dr Peter Strickland

Dr Joel and Liora Symons

Russell Taylor and Tara Obeyesekere

Frank Tisher OAM and Dr Miriam Tisher

Toomey

Andrew and Penny Torok

Ann and Larry Turner

Dr Elsa Underhill and Professor Malcolm Rimmer

Jayde Walker

Edward and Paddy White

Nic and Ann Willcock

Lorraine Woolley

Dr Kelly and Dr Heathcote Wright

C.F. Yeung & Family Philanthropic Fund

Demetrio Zema

Anonymous (16)

OVERTURE PATRONS $500+

Margaret Abbey PSM

Jane Allan and Mark Redmond

Mario M Anders

Jenny Anderson

Doris Au

Lyn Bailey

Robbie Barker

Peter Berry and Amanda Quirk

Dr William Birch AM

Robert Bridgart

Miranda Brockman

Dr Robert Brook

Robert and Katherine Coco

Dr John Collins

Warren Collins

Gregory Crew

Sue Cummings

Suzanne Dembo

Carol des Cognets

Bruce Dudon

Dr Catherine Duncan

Margaret Flatman

Brian Florence

Martin Foley

Elizabeth Foster

M C Friday

Simon Gaites

David and Geraldine Glenny

Hugo and Diane Goetze

Louise Gourlay OAM

Christine Grenda

Dawn Hales

George Hampel AM KC and Felicity Hampel AM SC

Alison Heard

Dr Jennifer Henry

C M Herd Endowment

Carole and Kenneth Hinchliff

William Holder

Peter and Jenny Hordern

Gillian Horwood

Oliver Hutton

Rob Jackson

Ian Jamieson

Wendy Johnson

Leonora Kearney

Irene Kearsey & Michael Ridley

John and Christine Keys

Lesley King

Heather Law

Pauline and David Lawton

Paschalina Leach

Kay Liu

David Loggia

Helen Maclean

Joy Manners

Morris and Helen Margolis

Sandra Masel in memory of Leigh Masel

Janice Mayfield

Gail McKay

Shirley A McKenzie

Dr Alan Meads and Sandra Boon

George Miles

Marie Misiurak

Adrian and Louise Nelson

Marian Neumann

Ed Newbigin

Valerie Newman

Dr Judith S Nimmo

Amanda O’Brien

Brendan O’Donnell

Phillip Parker

Sarah Patterson

The Hon Chris Pearce and Andrea Pearce

William Ramirez

Geoffrey Ravenscroft

Dr Christopher Rees

Professor John Rickard

Fred and Patricia Russell

Carolyn Sanders

Dr Marc Saunders

Julia Schlapp

Hon Jim Short and Jan Rothwell Short

Madeline Soloveychik

Allison Taylor

Hugh Taylor and Elizabeth Dax

Reverend Angela Thomas

Geoffrey Thomlinson

Mely Tjandra

Chris and Helen Trueman

Noel and Jenny Turnbull

Rosemary Warnock

Amanda Watson

Michael Whishaw

Deborah and Dr Kevin Whithear OAM

Adrian Wigney

David Willersdorf AM and Linda Willersdorf

Charles and Jill Wright

Richard Ye

Anonymous (16)

FUTURE MSO ($1,000+)

Justine Battistella

Shayna Burns

Jessica Agoston Cleary

Alexandra Champion de Crespigny

Josh Chye

Cara Cunningham

Akira Kikkawa

Barry Mowszowski

Jayde Walker

Demetrio Zema

MSO GUARDIANS

Jenny Anderson

David Angelovich

Lesley Bawden

Peter Berry and Amanda Quirk

Joyce Bown

Patricia A Breslin

Jenny Brukner and the late John Brukner

Sarah Bullen

Peter A Caldwell

Luci and Ron Chambers

Sandra Dent

Sophie E Dougall in memory of Libby Harold

Alan Egan JP

Gunta Eglite

Marguerite Garnon-Williams

Dr Clem Gruen and Dr Rhyl Wade

Louis J Hamon OAM

Charles Hardman and Julianne Bambacas

Carol Hay

Dr Jennifer Henry

Graham Hogarth

Rod Home

Lyndon Horsburgh

Katherine Horwood

Tony Howe

Lindsay and Michael Jacombs

John Jones

Merv Keehn and Sue Harlow

Pauline and David Lawton

Robyn and Maurice Lichter

Christopher Menz and Peter Rose

Cameron Mowat

Laurence O’Keefe and Christopher James

David Orr

Matthew O’Sullivan

Rosia Pasteur

Penny Rawlins

Margaret Riches

Anne Roussac-Hoyne and Neil Roussac

Michael Ryan and Wendy Mead

Anne Kieni Serpell and Andrew Serpell

Jennifer Shepherd

Suzette Sherazee

Professors Gabriela and George Stephenson

Pamela Swansson

Tam Vu and Dr Cherilyn Tillman

Frank Tisher OAM and Dr Miriam Tisher

Mr and Mrs R P Trebilcock

Peter and the late Elizabeth Turner

Michael Ullmer AO

The Hon Rosemary Varty

Francis Vergona

Terry Wills Cooke OAM and the late Marian Wills Cooke

Mark Young

Anonymous (23)

The MSO gratefully acknowledges the support of the following Estates:

Norma Ruth Atwell

Angela Beagley

Barbara Bobbe

Michael Francois Boyt

Christine Mary Bridgart

Margaret Anne Brien

Ken Bullen

Deidre and Malcolm Carkeek

The Cuming Bequest

Margaret Davies

Blair Doig Dixon

Neilma Gantner

Angela Felicity Glover

The Hon Dr Alan Goldberg AO QC

Derek John Grantham

Delina Victoria Schembri-Hardy

Enid Florence Hookey

Gwen Hunt

Family and Friends of James Jacoby

Audrey Jenkins

Joan Jones

Pauline Marie Johnston

Christine Mary Kellam

C P Kemp

Jennifer Selina Laurent

Sylvia Rose Lavelle

Peter Forbes MacLaren

Joan Winsome Maslen

Lorraine Maxine Meldrum

Prof Andrew McCredie

Jean Moore

Joan P Robinson

Maxwell and Jill Schultz

Miss Sheila Scotter AM MBE

Marion A I H M Spence

Molly Stephens

Gwennyth St John

Halinka Tarczynska-Fiddian

Jennifer May Teague

Elisabeth Turner

Albert Henry Ullin

Jean Tweedie

Herta and Fred B Vogel

Dorothy Wood

Joyce Winsome Woodroffe

COMMISSIONING CIRCLE

Cecilie Hall and the Late Hon Michael Watt KC

Tim and Lyn Edward

Weis Family

FIRST NATIONS CIRCLE

John and Lorraine Bates

Equity Trustees

Colin Golvan AM KC and Dr Deborah Golvan

Maestro Jaime Martín

Elizabeth Proust AO and Brian Lawrence

Guy Ross

The Sage Foundation

Michael Ullmer AO and Jenny Ullmer

ADOPT A MUSICIAN

Margaret Billson and the late Ted Billson

Peter Edwards

Shane Buggle and Rosie Callanan

Roger Young

Andrew Dudgeon AM

Rohan de Korte, Philippa West

Tim and Lyn Edward

John Arcaro

Dr John and Diana Frew

Rosie Turner

Sophie Galaise and Clarence Fraser

Stephen Newton

Dr Mary-Jane Gething AO

Monica Curro

The Gross Foundation

Matthew Tomkins

Dr Clem Gruen and Dr Rhyl Wade

Robert Cossom

Jean Hadges

Prudence Davis

Cecilie Hall and the late Hon Michael Watt KC

Saul Lewis

The Hanlon Foundation

Abbey Edlin

David Horowicz

Anne Marie Johnson

Dr Harry Imber

Sarah Curro, Jack Schiller

Margaret Jackson AC

Nicolas Fleury

Di Jameson OAM and Frank Mercurio

Elina Fashki, Benjamin Hanlon, Tair Khisambeev, Christopher Moore

Peter T Kempen AM

Rebecca Proietto

Rosemary and the late Douglas Meagher

Craig Hill

Professor Gary McPherson

Rachel Shaw

Anne Neil

Eleanor Mancini

Newton Family in memory of Rae Rothfield

Cong Gu

Patricia Nilsson

Natasha Thomas

Andrew and Judy Rogers

Michelle Wood

Glenn Sedgwick

Tiffany Cheng, Shane Hooton

Anonymous

Rachael Tobin

HONORARY APPOINTMENTS

Life Members

John Gandel AC and Pauline Gandel AC

Jean Hadges

Sir Elton John CBE

Lady Primrose Potter AC CMRI

Jeanne Pratt AC

Lady Marigold Southey AC

Michael Ullmer AO and Jenny Ullmer

MSO Ambassador

Tan Dun

Geoffrey Rush AC

The MSO honours the memory of Life Members

The late Marc Besen AC and the late Eva Besen AO

John Brockman OAM

The Honourable Alan Goldberg AO QC

Harold Mitchell AC

Roger Riordan AM

Ila Vanrenen

MSO ARTISTIC FAMILY

Jaime Martín

Chief Conductor

Benjamin Northey

Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor –Learning and Engagement

Leonard Weiss CF Cybec Assistant Conductor

Sir Andrew Davis CBE †

Conductor Laureate (2013–2024)

Hiroyuki Iwaki †

Conductor Laureate (1974–2006)

Warren Trevelyan-Jones

MSO Chorus Director

Erin Helyard

Artist in Residence

Karen Kyriakou

Artist in Residence, Learning and Engagement

Christian Li

Young Artist in Association

Katy Abbott Composer in Residence

Naomi Dodd

Cybec Young Composer in Residence

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO

First Nations Creative Chair

Artistic Ambassadors

Xian Zhang

Lu Siqing

MSO BOARD

Chairman

David Li AM

Co-Deputy Chairs

Margaret Jackson AC Di Jameson OAM

Managing Director

Sophie Galaise

Board Directors

Shane Buggle

Andrew Dudgeon AM

Martin Foley

Lorraine Hook

Gary McPherson

Farrel Meltzer

Edgar Myer

Mary Waldron

Company Secretary

Demetrio Zema

The MSO relies on your ongoing philanthropic support to sustain our artists, and support access, education, community engagement and more. We invite our supporters to get close to the MSO through a range of special events.

The MSO welcomes your support at any level. Donations of $2 and over are tax deductible, and supporters are recognised as follows:

$500+ (Overture)

$1,000+ (Player)

$2,500+ (Associate)

$5,000+ (Principal)

$10,000+ (Maestro)

$20,000+ (Impresario)

$50,000+ (Virtuoso)

$100,000+ (Platinum)

Join a new generation of giving.

Welcome to Future MSO – an initiative for young philanthropists and music lovers to connect over exclusive opportunities, while supporting the careers of exceptional emerging musicians, conductors and composers at the MSO.

Your tax time donation of $1,000 reveals:

• A community of like-minded, culturally engaged young professionals.

• An annual calendar of events for you and a guest to connect with patrons, MSO musicians and guest artists.

• The inner world of the Orchestra with experiences that bring you closer to the music.

AMPLIFY YOUR IMPACT BY JOINING FUTURE MSO TODAY.

Scan the QR code to join Future MSO today. Or email philanthropy@mso.com.au to discuss your involvement.

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

Thank you to our Partners

PREMIER PARTNER

MAJOR PARTNERS

VENUE PARTNER

INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM PARTNER

GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

EDUCATION PARTNERS

ORCHESTRAL TRAINING PARTNER

SUPPORTING PARTNERS

Quest Southbank Ernst & Young

MEDIA AND BROADCAST PARTNERS

TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS

Flora & Frank Leith Trust, Sidney Myer MSO Trust Fund