Sydney Symphony starts Easter week with blaze of brass and sunshine

The bright ringing tones of SSO’s brass section summoned up the splendour of the Baroque at an afternoon concert where the Sydney Town Hall’s majestic setting was matched by the music.

Sydney Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Andrew Haveron led a performance of Haydn for an Easter week celebration.

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The bright ringing tones of SSO’s brass section summoned up the splendour of the Baroque as a curtain opener to a Saturday afternoon concert where the Sydney Town Hall’s majestic setting was matched by the music.

The tragedy and grief of the floods were put aside for a couple of hours as Sydneysiders basked in the welcome sun outside and the consummate musicianship inside the hall.

With its season scaled down because of the uncertainties and travel restrictions caused by Covid, the orchestra’s celebration of Easter week was a modest affair, with Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of our Redeemer from the Cross, led by concertmaster Andrew Haveron, the main work on the program.

It was commissioned by the Bishop of Cadiz who wanted music to intersperse his readings of Christ’s final utterances. The result was seven orchestral “sonatas” – each of them slow – as well as a majestic introduction, also slow, and a final dramatic flourish depicting the earthquake the Gospels describe at the moment of death.

CHALLENGE

The work is more often heard in its string quartet arrangement, and there is also a solo keyboard and an oratorio version. The challenge for the composer was how to make a 70-minute collection of slow movements interesting and in this he succeeded brilliantly. This orchestral performance never dragged, thanks to Haveron and his colleagues’ beautifully nuanced playing, with the music broken up by texts read by SSO principal trombone Ronald Prussing.

Prussing also featured in the first half, this time as conductor of a 12-piece brass band which played two canzoni by 16th century Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli, alongside works by two 20th century American composers, Samuel Barber and Morton Lauridsen, both of which showed off the full majesty of four trumpets, four horns, three trombones and a tuba playing together.

DETAILS

●CONCERT Sydney Symphony: Spiritual Connections

●WHERE Sydney Town Hall

●WHEN Saturday, March 27