Inner West Symphony Orchestra | Love, Death & Destiny
November 24, 2024, Williamstown Town Hall, VIC
If someone tells you that they don’t know any classical music, they are most probably wrong. As my date discovered at his first ever symphonic concert, Love, Death & Destiny with the Inner West Symphony Orchestra at the historic Williamstown Town Hall.
Community symphony orchestras can be found all over the country, in regional cities or dotted through the suburbs, they are vital both for the players and to keep the symphonic tradition alive. They provide a space for non-professional musicians to continue to perform and be engaged with music, an entry point for listeners both young and old, and a safe place for composers to develop their craft.
So I was thrilled earlier this year to hear that Melbourne’s western suburbs would have their own symphony orchestra. This was the third concert of their first season. To witness this the Town Hall was packed with friends and family members welding mobile devices, young children in all stages of attention, grannies and grandads, uncles and aunties, smartly dressed and comfy clothes. Everyone there to be entertained and to support the players.
Pre-event, we were treated to songs by the Grace Notes Singers, a local women’s choral group directed and accompanied by Ed Chan. The choir of women only voices was beautifully blended and warm. They popped up again later in the program to since that Kern/Hammerstien classic All the Things You Are and a wonderful setting of Kipling’s The Seal Lullaby by Eric Whitacre.
When the orchestra came on stage, the audience had been well and truly warmed up. And when the opening theme of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man filled the hall, my friend gasped, recognising it as the tune from Wide World of Sports from the telly of his childhood.
Michael Potts continued to lead the orchestra for Verdi’s La forza del destino. A wonderful and tumultuous work which the orchestra really got its teeth into. It was wonderful to see the full orchestra of over 60 players reflecting the diversity of the local community, all ages, genders, neurodiversity (we were told in the President’s speech!) and backgrounds.
Conductor Andrew Leach then took the stage for the selected movements from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet completed Act One of the concert. There were nine movements ordered in a sensible story telling way. The great duelling themes of the Montagues and Capulets, the star struck lovers of course, and the tragedy of the Death of Tybalt and Romeo at Juliet’s Grave.
The orchestra rose to the occasion of the work. The list of soloists who did great honour to their sections and instruments include Kim Pearson on flute and piccolo, Katie Rees on oboe, Greg Strong on clarinet, Oscar Lane on bassoon, and Greg Leibel who delivered that haunting tenor saxophone solo in the Montagues and Capulets movement.
Act Two was made up of four orchestral bangers. Ralph Vaughan-Williams Fantasia on Greensleeves, with its delicate and extended passages for harp played by Jeremy Leung. The next work was a World Premiere, with the composer present and playing in the orchestra.
Sabrina Yousif is a composer and violinist, who trained at University of Melbourne where she studied interactive composition. Her work Mist and Fury was almost filmic, as she led us through tiers and chambers of varying rhythmic and melodic intensity. The strings certainly got a good workout and the effect was like a storm or weather pattern of sound. It was a lovely movement for all of us, the composer, orchestra and audience to be together for this very special first hearing of the work.
Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Binder/Offenbach’s Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld need very little introduction. The work the orchestra had invested under the baton of Andrew Leach in the whole program was especially evidenced in the Mussorgsky, where the whole orchestra were finely attuned to the intention of the work. More than just the right notes at the right time, the music was imbued with all the horror and grotesque of the action and leading us to the sunrise of the new day.
Throughout it all Michael Patton was fantastic as Concertmaster, a joy to watch. The music was illuminated by colourful projections. And while there was a lot of music, it was all well worth listening to for the first time or the fiftieth.
And what of my first time friend at the symphony? Well apparently there were many other themes contained in the concert that are used for commercials, film scores and on telly.
So do take your nan or your niece to the next community symphony orchestra concert near you. The tickets are reasonable and there’s such a buzz. It might even spark a lifetime’s passion and interest in music.
