WASO Concert Delights Audience

17 OCTOBER 2021

WASO CONCERT DELIGHTS AUDIENCE

The Western Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), joined by music students from UWA, delighted the more than 500 audience members who were eagerly looking forward to this annual concert at St Mary’s Cathedral.

The Cathedral’s Director of Music, Jacinta Jakovcevic said, “It was a delight to host the WASO Chorus once again. This particular programme featured the ‘Mass in D’ written by Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak, in 1887, for chorus and orchestra.

The orchestral accompaniment was played on our Grand Organ, which WASO asked me to play. The Cathedral’s Grand Organ, built by JE Dodd in 1910, is of a ‘symphonic’ style; meaning that generally speaking, it emulates the rich, sonorous orchestral textures of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It provided a wonderful tonal combination as well as being a thrill, and a bit of challenge, to simulate Dvorak’s orchestral sonorities on our instrument.

The WASO Chorus sang Handel’s perennial favourite ‘Zadok the Priest’ accompanied on pipe organ, and Bruckner’s ‘Locus Iste’, an unaccompanied motet whose text emanates from the liturgies of the Dedication of a Church/Cathedral.

It was sung at the Cathedral’s reopening in 2009 by the Cathedral Choir,” said Jacinta.

Andrew Foote conducts the WASO Chorus.