Program
- Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014): Sun Music III (1967)
- Benjamin Britten (1913–1976): Violin Concerto, Op. 15 (1938–39)
- Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958): Symphony No. 6 in E minor
This bold, emotionally charged program filled the iconic Sydney Opera House Concert Hall with music that invited reflection on human resilience amid disturbance and unrest—works written either side of the Second World War that still speak urgently to our world today.
Simone Young, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), is an acclaimed Australian conductor known worldwide for her commanding presence on the podium, precise yet passionate style, and ability to draw musicians and audiences into deeper journeys. This concert celebrated her ongoing deep musical connection with the orchestra, marking 30 years since her SSO debut, as she guided them through two powerful 20th-century British masterworks alongside an Australian opener.
The concert opened with Peter Sculthorpe’s seminal Sun Music III (1967), a landmark from the mid-1960s when Australian composers were turning away from dominant English influences to embrace Indigenous Australian elements and Asian musical traditions, forging a distinctly local sonic identity. Sculthorpe experiments with unconventional melodic fragments, harmonic clusters, and shimmering textures from strings and percussion to evoke a profound sense of vast Australian space, ancient ritual, and the relentless glare of the outback sun.
Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto opens with the solo violin entering soon after a terse timpani rhythm, weaving its soaring, lyrical motifs dancelike above the persistent underlying ostinato. This opening melody carries a distinctly romantic feel—long-breathed, expressive, and bittersweet, drifting between major and minor hues for poignant emotional depth.
The second movement bursts ahead with fierce, nonstop energy—a fast, restless scherzo full of driving rhythms, big leaping octaves, off-beat accents, and a sharp, almost mocking edge that feels like biting sarcasm in the face of growing war tensions. It races through wild, virtuosic passages with sudden shifts to a haunting, gypsy-flavored middle section, then explodes into a long, intense cadenza where the solo violin plays alone, desperately searching and recalling earlier themes in a raw, frantic outburst of anguish.
Moving straight into the third movement—a profound passacaglia that flows without pause from the cadenza—the trombones make their dramatic first entrance in the entire concerto, solemnly introducing the repeating bass theme with deep, mournful weight that anchors the music in quiet despair. The solo violin contrasts its earlier fierce urgency with evocative danse macabre episodes, where high, weaving lines twist like a spectral fiddler leading the dead in a haunting, ironic last waltz amid the relentless ground bass. Marvellous Dutch soloist Simone Lamsma held the intensity throughout with commanding presence and searing clarity, cradling her Stradivarius to extract aching, song-like lines right up to the final, suspended moment of silence.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6 opens with a soaring, turbulent surge—full orchestra clashing in E minor and F minor, unleashing desperate rising octaves and ferocious brass against shrieking strings, immediately introducing unstable harmonic tensions and stark contrasts that evoke chaos and unresolved conflict from the first bars.
Composed in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1944–1947), the symphony draws on Vaughan Williams’ wartime experiences, including his scores for Allied propaganda films like Coastal Command (1942), where he repurposed biting brass fanfares and mashed them into the savage scherzo. This third movement channels the disruptive spirit and energetic drive of Beethoven’s scherzos alongside the lighter yet abrupt turns of Schubert’s, but subverts them into a sardonic, ferocious outburst—a biting, carnival-like commentary on postwar chaos with mocking woodwind tunes and grotesque twists.
The final movement is a quiet, ghostly epilogue that stays very soft the whole way through—no big swells or loud moments. It wanders like a lost soul in an empty, barren place, with faint strings and brass floating around before two simple chords gently rock back and forth, getting softer and softer until the music just fades away into complete silence and nothingness.
Under Simone Young’s masterful direction, the orchestra delivered the symphony’s ghostly finale with exquisite control and profound stillness.
For the second time that evening—echoing the suspended hush at the close of Britten’s Violin Concerto—this ending left the entire hall wrapped in a deep, haunting quiet, with the audience holding its breath in stunned reverence before applause finally broke the tension.
Photography – the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
