New Nigel Westlake works probe outer space and an Aboriginal activist pioneer

A thought-provoking and enjoyable one-off concert by Sydney Symphony Orchestra featured two new works by composer Nigel Westlake.

Singer-songwriter Lior performed with Dr Lou Bennetts.

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Two major news works by Australian composer Nigel Westlake – a song cycle inspired by an Aboriginal elder’s protest against the Nazi attacks on German Jews and a trumpet concerto based on NASA’s project to land a spacecraft on an asteroid – featured in a thought-provoking and enjoyable one-off concert by Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Conducted by the composer and featuring singer-songwriter Lior and former member of Tiddas vocal group and composer Dr Lou Bennett, Ngapa (Grandfather) William Cooper relates through song how the Yorta Yorta activist was so shocked and enraged by the 1938 arrests and attacks on Jews and their synagogues and businesses that he led a delegation of Melbourne Aboriginal protesters on a march through Melbourne to the German consulate to present a petition calling on Hitler’s government to stop the persecution and killings.

The letter never reached its intended recipients – probably thrown away by a guard – until Cooper’s grandson and members of Melbourne’s Jewish community presented a duplicate to the German government at the Australian Embassy in Berlin almost 80 years later.

The song cycle, commissioned for the Adelaide Festival, is an expansion in both English and Yorta Yorta of Westlake and Lior’s Compassion collaboration which resulted in 2013 in the album of the same name, recorded with the SSO. For the new work, featuring 15 SSO musicians under associate concertmaster Harry Bennetts, and pianist Andrea Lam, Lior and Bennett weave a compelling narrative linking the persecution of the Jews with the plight of First Nation people in Australia.

Cooper, whose son was killed in action in World War I, says in one song: “He had no land/And he had no rights/From a nation who made no distinction/Who it sent off to fight.”

Lam’s piano and Rebecca Lagos’s array of percussion instruments gave a vibrant dimension to Westlake’s arrangements, many of which had used the original Compassion work as a template. Bennetts violin and Kaori Yamagami’s keening cello were called on throughout the 35-minute piece, and Lior’s clear, high vocals with their weaving lines were fully complemented by Bennett’s rich and expressive voice and compelling gestures and stage presence.

Hopefully Westlake and his collaborators will record this as it is a work, and a subject, that deserves to reach a wider audience.

WA-born associate principal Brenton Grapes starred in the other Westlake work, Psyche, which acted both as a moving commemoration to Grapes’s predecessor and SSO regular for 22 years Paul Goodchild, who died in 2021, and a tribute to NASA’s six-year mission, launched last year, to fly 3.6 billion kilometres to land on the rare metal asteroid Psyche, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

After the brief first memorial movement, played by Grapes off stage, Westlake takes us through the power and energy of the launch – Lagos and Lam both contributing maximum turbulence – to the heft and pull of the third movement where the spacecraft uses Mars’ gravity to catapult itself to the asteroid belt.

The final movement features some teasing and playful trumpet work as the craft makes its landing.

Westlake is one of our finest cinema soundtrack composers – his credits include the Babe movies, Paper Planes and Children of the Revolution – and this concert highlighted his ability to drive the narrative using diverse and attractive tonal effects.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Ngapa William Cooper

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN May 23, 2024