Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 10 Oct 2025
Fate is the seventh concert in the current flagship Symphony Series presented by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO). It was held in the Adelaide Town Hall and included Angel: Poem Nocturne by Feodor Akimenko, Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano No.1 in C, Op.15, and Tchaikvosky’s Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36. The concert was conducted by the internationally acclaimed Martyn Brabbins and featured Benjamin Grosvenor on the piano, and it was fabulous!
Feodor Akimenko (1876-1945) was a Ukrainian pianist and composer, and some of his catalogue can be found on YouTube, although he is not well known. This reviewer, and presumably other lovers of fine music, first became aware of Akimenko’s music in the days and months that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the broader arts community became interested in actively supporting Ukrainian artists and culture. Indeed, the ASO has recently performed works by Valentin Silvestrov and Victoria Poleva.
Akimenko's Angel, dubbed a ‘poem nocturne’, comes in at around ten minutes and is sublime. Its orchestration is lush but clean, and its melodies soar and descend as might a spirit exploring unworldly places. Martyn Brabbins ensured the orchestra played with exquisite articulation and phrasing, which was a feature of the entire concert. Angel gently encourages the listener to close one’s eyes and drift with the music. It is sublime. Angel does not leave the listener with an ‘ear worm’ to hum later, but it is deeply satisfying, and the feeling of contentment lingers long afterwards.
Benjamin Grosvenor is one of the finest pianists of his generation, and he partnered superbly with Brabbins to get right under the skin of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 and expose its rich melodies, tonal surprises, invention, liveliness, and humour. As intimated above, Brabbins ensured the orchestra’s phrasing was eloquent and empathetic to the soloist. Grosvenor was superb at the keyboard, and like Brabbins, he accomplished his music making cleanly and without distracting histrionics. Grosvenor looked calm and in total control, and during the lyrical and stately largo second movement, he almost gave the impression he was analysing the music as he played it. The dialogue between the piano and clarinet was simply gorgeous. The final movement saw Grosvenor unleash his virtuosic skills, but none more so than in the Ravel encore he generously performed at the concerto’s conclusion, which was a true highlight of the evening: elegant dynamics with impressive and precisely executed cross and overlapping hands. Grosvenor accepted the enthusiastic applause almost with humbleness, and the audience knew it had heard something special.
Brabbins reading of Tchaikvosky’s Symphony No.4 exposed the string sections of the ASO as the true stars that they are. The third movement features extended pizzicato sections, and the magnificence of the music only comes through clearly if each section of the strings plays ‘as one’ as the pizzicato is executed, otherwise it risks becoming blurred. The strings of the ASO came up trumps and it was a joy to see the principal string players lead with precision, clarity and unyielding strictness in timing and tempo. Brabbins allowed them to get on with it and never unnecessarily imposed himself on their music making. The symphony features a number of sumptuous and memorable melodies that are enthusiastically proclaimed by the brass, horns, and woodwinds, and by the time it is over one’s faith in humanity and the sheer restorative power of music is somewhat restored.
Fittingly, Brabbins insisted on every section of the ASO taking a well-deserved bow, not just some. This reviewer is still smiling that the strings were also singled out, and deservedly so. They are so often taken for granted.
Kym Clayton
When: 10 Oct
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. St Peter’s Cathedral. 19 Sep 2025
Remember is the second and final concert in the current Sacred and Profane series presented by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. It was held in St Peter’s Cathedral and included Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, and Requiem, K.626, by W. Mozart (completed by F. Süssmayr).
The juxtaposition of the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ is interesting, and there is almost an implication that the musical composition that is tagged ‘profane’ (in this case the Strauss) is in some way irreverent or disrespectful. Nothing could be further than the truth – in this instance, Metamorphosen is simply secular, or not related to religion. Having said that, the emotion that slowly boils over in Metamorphosen is an almost spiritual experience in itself. As one young concertgoer remarked to me after it was finished, it is almost a meditative experience where one doesn’t really care about the composition’s provenance. It just ‘gets to you’, and listening to it in the magnificence and sublime acoustics of St Peter’s Cathedral amplifies these feelings. Indeed, as the final notes faded away, the audience barely moved and didn’t’ start to applaud for a full ten seconds. We had been transported to another place, and it took time to return to the ‘here and now’.
Pairing Strauss’ Metamorphosen with Mozart’s Requiem creates a profoundly affecting and emotionally rich concert experience, with both works exploring themes of loss, reflection, and the search for meaning – though in very different ways.
Strauss wrote Metamorphosen near the end of World War II, as Germany lay in ruins. It’s a work for 23 solo strings, unfolding as one continuous movement of sorrow and reflection. Strauss was mourning not only the destruction of his homeland but also the loss of an entire cultural world. The music is intimate and deeply personal, at times dark and brooding, at others tender and wistful. Its melodies unhurriedly develop and become the warp and weft of a rich musical tapestry.
By contrast, Mozart’s Requiem is intense and steeped in religious belief, even though Mozart leaned more to Freemasonry than he did to the Catholic Faith. Written in the final months of Mozart’s life, and left unfinished at his death—it is believed he was dictating the music to an assistant as he lay in his death bed—it carries an air of mystery. Requiem is a setting of the Catholic Mass for the Dead, and it is full of stark divergences: the calm of the “Lacrimosa” is contrasted with the potent emotion of the “Dies Irae”, the “Confutatis” and the “Lacrimosa”. (The 1984 multi-award-winning film Amadeus includes a powerful scene where the dying Mozart dictates fragments of the “Confutatis” as the music swells.) One cannot help being taken on a highly personal journey from a dark and foreboding place to feelings of hope and transcendence as one listens to Requiem.
The pairing of Metamorphosen and Requiem speaks to both the heart and soul, and the emotion of the concert is driven by the superb musicianship of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Mark Wigglesworth, the Adelaide Chamber singers, and the soloists: soprano Madison Nonoa, mezzo-soprano Anne Dowsley, tenor Andrew Goodwin, and baritone Simon Measdow. To a person, they stamped their authority on the program, and Wigglesworth was very careful to set both tempi and dynamics to ensure the performance was sympathetic to the acoustics of the cathedral. It was all finely and expertly balanced.
This concert was a much-needed oasis of musical reflection to counter being overwhelmed by a troubled world.
Kym Clayton
When: 19 Sep
Where: St Peter’s Cathedral
Bookings: Closed
ABE Nsemble. Metropolitan Hotel. 10 Sep 2025
Two award-winning German sound artists visiting Australia, Johannes S. Sistermanns and Joachim Zoepf of the (unusually spelled) ABE N semble, gave a most enthralling performance of experimental sound art at the Metropolitan Hotel’s monthly Experimental Music Night on 10 September.
Introducing the performance, Sistermanns indicated that they are undertaking research on the question, ‘how does (the) new emerge?’, a question that he says bedevils sound artists and instrument makers.
Sistermanns’ wide-ranging oeuvre explores all manner of sound, its generation, its functioning and effects in space and its apprehension by and significance to the listener. As well as using musical instruments and other objects, his experimental approach often involves activating the walls and other fixtures in the performance space.
Saxophonist and bass clarinettist, composer and teacher Joachim Zoepf also specialises in improvised electro-acoustic performance. While Sistermanns performed on a 39-string monochord, Zoepf used electronics and a laptop to process the sound produced by the closely microphoned monochord.
A monochord is a stringed instrument with a long, hollow timber body and guitar-like sound holes on either side that was developed in Greece and used by Pythagoras around 500 BCE to calculate musical intervals. It is thus a seminal device in the history of musical notation, composition and instrumental development, and its use today invites broader consideration of the possibilities of sound production and reception.
The performance opened with Sistermanns singing in overtones while slowly stepping into the Metropolitan Hotel’s small, intimate and enthusiastically crowded music room. He often uses overtone signing to identify the standing sound wave that is characteristic of a space.
He then began performing on the monochord — strumming it with his hands or small sticks, bowing it with a violin bow, stroking the strings with paper or a stone, placing an ‘exciter’ (a small device that vibrates) on the strings to generate a drone, tapping the monochord’s body, pressing a contact microphone against it while playing it to amplify its resonances, and singing into it through its sound holes. These diverse and exploratory playing techniques combined to generate a unique and incredible range of sounds.
At the desk, Joachim Zoepf adroitly mixed the sound from the monochord with prerecorded material including birdsong, a short speech and many other musical sounds to create a densely layered and at times quite overwhelming orchestration of sonic material. The audience could try to guess the prerecorded sound sources and their symbolic potential, consider the effects of the sound in the room and their experience as listeners, or simply bring their awareness to the sounds as they emerge and dissipate, and observe the action on stage.
This use of the monochord greatly extends Pythagoras’s experimental study. But the effect is not only aural — the physicality of Sistermanns’s singing and exploration of the monochord created a highly theatrical effect, and he dramatically plunged the violin bow into the monochord’s sound holes, like an arrow through a body, to conclude the performance. The sound could not be separated from its performative characteristics.
In the notes to their album How does the (new) emerge, the ABE Nsemble asks at what point the ‘new’ emerges — when instruments are played, or when the resulting sound fills the air in the performance space, or when the sound vibrations in the air impact the surfaces of the space. They question the linear time sequence involved in performance. They state,
“The ‘nsemble’ plays nothing to the audience. ‘The nsemble’ dissolves the usual audience relationship to become a situational-intuitive creative process. Our focus: the moment of the emergence of a spatial digital performance using sensor and audio technologies as well as electro/acoustic instruments. We assume this is a way to provoke the new.”
This profoundly stimulating performance explored the phenomenology of sound — in the absence of any kind of compositional structure, the listener becomes consciously aware of the subjective experience of listening and of the dynamic relationship between sound in space, its physicality and its unfolding in time.
The third member of the ABE Nsemble, Adelaide composer and sound artist Gabriella Smart, was unfortunately unavailable for this event.
Chris Reid
When: 10 Sep 2025
Where: Metropolitan Hotel
More info: sistermanns.eu
The ABE Nsemble’s CD is available at Bandcamp: https://joachimzoepf.bandcamp.com/album/how-does-the-new-emerge
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 13 Sep 2025
Shadows is possibly the best concert in the Adelaide Symphony Series for a number of years. It’s a risky term to use, but ‘world class’ comes to mind when trying to describe how one feels about this recent concert. The programming was inspired, the soloist in the concerto was amongst the best you could ever hear, and the conductor’s reading of everything on the program together with his finely balanced control of the orchestra was gobsmacking inspired. This was a concert that put a broad smile on your face (and kept it there for many hours), stirred your soul, and invigorated your appetite to revisit the same music later in the comfort of your own home hoping the experience approached what you enjoyed in the concert hall.
The concert featured Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ delightful Three Gymnopédies, Benjamin Britten’s exciting Concerto for Violin No.1, Op.15, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s epic and stirring Symphony No.10 in E Minor, Op.93. These three compositions sharply contrast with each other and evoke markedly different responses from the listener.
Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Three Gymnopédies are impressionistic miniatures, that are clearly inspired by Erik Satie but have an Australian sensibility. Their delicate textures and tender songfulness create a sense of tranquillity and meditation. Each movement evokes a sense of the fleeting, and is understated yet evocative with subtle shifts in colour and phrasing.
Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto No. 1 contrasts sharply with the restraint of the Gymnopédies. Written on the eve of World War II, it teems with tension and emotional depth. The opening movement’s poignant lyricism transitions to an aggressive scherzo, and the concluding passacaglia builds in relentless intensity. The dialogue between soloist and orchestra is scintillating, and violinist Clara-Jumi Kang relished in contrasting the composition’s lyric beauty and sharp, modern ‘edges’. Her technique is very impressive, with much intricate double stopping and simultaneous bowing and plucking of strings.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, composed after Stalin’s death, is monumental and profoundly dramatic. Its vast first movement is brooding and expansive, and the second is a biting, whirlwind scherzo. Much has been written about the extent to which Shostakovich intended the symphony, and especially the second movement, to be a political comment about the welcome death of Stalin. The extent to which this is true is irrelevant, and the music stands by itself. It is passionate, emotional and brooding. The third movement introduces Shostakovich’s personal DSCH motif (i.e. the notes D-E flat-C-B), while the finale moves from gloom and darkness to a triumphant and defiant close. The raw power of the orchestra throughout is almost overwhelming, and conductor Mark Wigglesworth gives an exemplary reading and never fails to allow all featured instruments to shine through above the ensemble.
Indeed, it was a true delight to have so many of the ASO’s musicians foregrounded throughout the unfolding of this monumental work (that lasts for almost an hour) and of the Three Gymnopédies and the Concerto for Violin. Together, the three works trace a journey from intimate reflection to political and emotional upheaval.
At the end of the concert, not a murmur could be held in the auditorium as the final notes of the symphony faded away. And then the audience erupted with heartfelt enthusiasm for what was a superbly rendered concert. Wigglesworth was brought back to the podium multiple times. The audience could not get enough of him, or the ASO.
Kym Clayton
When: 13 Sep
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Curated by Jesse Budel. Nexus Arts. 1 Sep 2025
The combination of live performance with pre-recorded sound makes for a fascinating program in the first of two concerts, entitled COMA @ Nexus, curated by composer and sound artist Jesse Budel on the theme of acoustic ecology.
Budel has been working in the field of acoustic ecology for several years and undertook his PhD research in this area. It involves the recording of sounds from the environment and the manipulation of these recordings to produce sound art works, which are sometimes accompanied by live performance. In 2024 he won the Independent Arts Foundation’s Award for Innovation for his work.
The concert featured two works, firstly by the duo comprising vocalists and sound artists Georgia Oatley and Margie Jean Lewis, and then by Budel himself. Lewis composed and performed music for the current Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition Dangerously Modern.
Georgia Oatley and Margie Jean Lewis,
Nexus Arts, photo Chris Reid
Their composition entitled Soak comprised a blend of field recordings, mostly taken by Oatley from the Aldinga Beach Conservation Park during her Soundstream Emerging Composer’s Residency, over which they sang, and Lewis played violin. Their live elements responded to and were electronically mediated and mixed in with the field recordings to produce a complex orchestration of sound, such as the wind and waves washing on the shore, together with short samples of their vocal elements that were repeated and layered.
The sound was relayed through a public address system comprising an octophonic array — eight loudspeakers positioned around the perimeter of the auditorium so that audience members hear sounds emanating from all around them.
Being surrounded by these gentle, whispering sounds places the listener in a meditative but attentive state, as you focus on individual sounds and identify their origins. Such sound art recalls the work of the late American composer Pauline Oliveros, who encouraged the practice of deep listening.
Importantly, the use of field recordings draws attention to the environment, and Oatley, who was one of COMA’s emerging artists of 2021 and has an extensive catalogue of work, indicated in her talk that this work was a response to the drought affecting the Adelaide Hills. She also noted the impact of the algal bloom that has infested the waters off South Australia’s coast.
Prior to their performance, Oatley led the audience in a brief vocal work to put them into a suitably receptive state and to show how singing together creates a sense of community.
Jesse Budel, Nexus Arts, photo Chris Reid
For his performance, entitled Sanctuary x Mill, Budel performed at the piano in response to pre-recorded material relayed through the multi-channel, octophonic speaker array, so that there were nine sources of sound altogether — the eight speakers and the piano — each producing discrete sounds.
Budel indicated in his talk that the recordings were sampled from the playing of ‘ruined’ pianos located at the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary, which he founded some years ago, and a similar collection of such pianos at the Piano Mill in southeast Queensland which was established by the Clocked Out Duo, musicians and composers Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold. Both Budel and Griswold contributed to the recording in a musical exchange as part of an international project, the Weathered Piano Exchange.
The Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary comprises several discarded upright pianos sitting outdoors in parkland and allowed to decay. Depressing the piano’s keys, plucking the corroded strings and tapping the body of such a piano produces sounds reminiscent of a well-maintained piano, but grossly distorted and out of tune. The sound of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, kookaburras and other birds can be heard in the background, bringing ambient environmental sounds into the mix.
In his performance, which comprises four movements, Budel improvised a response to the recorded material on Nexus’s grand piano, performing on the keys, tapping the piano’s case, and using small sticks to strike the piano’s strings directly.
The resulting orchestration of this diverse range of sounds was utterly absorbing, immersing the audience in a sonic world that situates the piano and its life cycle in the living environment. The sound is wondrous, but the message is also clear: the decaying piano may be seen as an allegory for human civilisation, with music as the transient, fragile expression of civilisation, and it obliquely recalls the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi — finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence.
This concert was a delight but also deeply thought-provoking. The use of electronic technology greatly expands the field of musical composition and permits the composer not only to draw on a much wider range of sonic material and effects but also to draw in the symbolism of the sound sources. The use of live, mediated performance together with pre-recorded samples creates a novel musical form that generates a unique aesthetic and enables the composer-performer to highlight important issues. Both works in this concert gently but firmly reminded listeners of the precarious environmental situation confronting us.
These concerts were conducted under the auspices of COMA (Creative Original Music Adelaide), a volunteer-led organisation involving many musicians that fosters the development and presentation of new music in Adelaide. Most of COMA’s events are held at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, but for this series, Nexus Arts has made available its auditorium, which better suits the performance of the compositions in the program.
Chris Reid
When: 1 Sep 2025
Where: Nexus Arts
More info: coma.net.au
The second concert in Budel’s acoustic ecology series will take place at Nexus on 15 September
Jesse Budel, photo Chris Reid