David Robertson starts his last SSO year with bang

Conductor David Robertson has started his sixth and final season as artistic director of Sydney Symphony Orchestra with a bang.

David Robertson has launched his final season as chief conducted of Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

• A launch to inspire
• Turandot ticks all the boxes
• Bohemian and rhapsodic
• Mahler from the top shelf

Conductor David Robertson has started his sixth and final season as artistic director of Sydney Symphony Orchestra with a bang with concerts designed to demonstrate what a top-class band he has under his baton.

The opening gala night featured that orchestral warhorse Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and the second program consisted of three works aimed at showcasing the SSO’s versatility and many of its fine soloists.

The orchestra hasn’t performed Leos Janacek’s rhapsody Taras Bulba since 2005 and it certainly makes a great curtain raiser. The three movements are based on grim and dramatic excerpts from Russian writer Nicolai Gogol’s patriotic epic novel about a Cossack chief.

The music is far from sombre as the composer saw the Russians’ fight against the Poles as allied to his own dream of an independent Czech nation and culture. This big number proved the perfect counterweight to Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, which closed the evening.

CHAMPIONED

In between Robertson conducted the Australian premiere of a new orchestral work by US minimalist composer Steve Reich. The piece — Music for Ensemble and Orchestra — was commissioned by the SSO jointly with five other leading orchestras and represents a return to large form writing by Reich after he stopped in the late 1980s because he found the musicians of that era were “completely out of touch” with his idiom and unable to play it.

Times have changed, largely thanks to conductors like Robertson who has championed many contemporary American composers in his career.

Hypnotic sheen of sound ... Far from being monotonous the effect is positive and at times joyful

The new work gives a nod to Bartok, especially in the arch-like structure that the Hungarian composer espoused. It is described as “part concerto, part orchestral suite” and the “ensemble” comprises two pianos, two sets of vibraphones, a bass guitar and the front row of strings the woodwinds. For the orchestra Reich has added four trumpets and strings.

The constantly changing rhythms set up by the pianos and percussionists produce a hypnotic sheen of sound with the woodwinds, strings and brass overlaying strong melodic lines. Far from being monotonous the effect is positive and at times joyful.

Bartok’s concerto, on the other hand, journeys in five movements from darkly brooding to life affirming. Along the way there are plenty of highlights, including a lighthearted sequence of duets between twinned instruments — two flutes, two clarinets and so forth — and an “interrupted intermezzo” featuring some Slavic folk tunes.

It all finishes fast and furious and guaranteed to bring the house down.

Next up Robertson and the SSO will be joined in the Opera House Concert Hall by superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis for concerts on Thursday, February 21, at 6.30pm; Friday, February 22, at 8pm, and Monday, February 25, at 7pm.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Sydney Symphony Orchestra

● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN: Saturday, February 16