W.A. Symphony Orchestra
Perth Concert Hall
reviewed by Neville Cohn
If, as a result of unavoidable circumstances, I’d come very late to the WASO’s concert at the weekend and managed to listen to only the last work on the program, I’d have gone home well satisfied. Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story was a sonically incandescent offering with irresistible rhythms, thrilling responses from the brass players and with those in the WASO’s bustling “kitchen department” in particular. delivering a sizzlingly effective conclusion to the evening. This was the orchestra at its focussed best.
This was particularly welcome because the evening’s curtainraiser – the overture to Candide – was disappointingly routine. Three Dance Episodes from On the Town came across in a more spirited fashion. The brass section was splendidly effective in The Great Lover – and a beautifully considered woodwind introduction to Lonely Town, that splendid pas de deux, fell pleasingly on the ear Here, hushed notes from Brent Grapes on trumpet were spot-on as were contributions from flute and oboe. And I very much liked the verve with which Times Square 1944 came across.
Peak of the first half was a thrillingly intense and focussed account of a suite from Bernstein’s music for the 1954 movie On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando. Like the movie, the music is the very essence of threatened and actual physical violence. Its undercurrents, in turn threatening and sinister, reinforced by emphatic drumming, make for hackle-raising listening. Conductor Benjamin Northey and the WASO sounded as one here.
During the intermission, I overheard an elderly man stating emphatically that he did not approve of a Jew setting psalms for use in a Christian church. I wondered whether he’d also have been upset had he been told that Franz Schubert, a Catholic, was commissioned by the cantor of a synagogue in Vienna to make a choral setting of Psalm 92 from the Old Testament!
Countertenor Nicholas Tolputt sang Psalm 23 in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, bringing to this much loved text an almost eerie beauty. It was sung in the original Hebrew. An in-form WASO Chorus sang beautifully, bringing a gentle, lyrical – and reverential – quality to the setting of Psalm 131, especially while singing the words which in English read:
“Surely I have calmed
And quieted myself,
As a child that is weaned of his mother…….”
And in “Why do the nations rage” from Psalm 2, both chorus and orchestra brought point and meaning to the powerful text. But rather more care might have been expended on the pronunciation of the Hebrew text. And, surely, a WASO audience which almost invariably applauds only at appropriate moments, could have done better and restrained itself from clapping loudly and intrusively between sections of the work. It well-intentioned response to a fine performance effectively demolished the mood so painstakingly built up during each section of the work.
