Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 11 Jun 2025
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Matinée Series is a true delight. A one-hour concert late in the morning is a welcome respite from the day’s toil without significantly impacting diaries, and the ASO is generally keen to program music that, for whatever reason, is less frequently played. The draw card for this reviewer to the recent concert in the series was Vaughan Williams Concerto for Tuba, which comes in at a modest 12-15 minutes. A concerto for tuba! Who would have even thought that one existed, but exist it does, and it is just delightful.
The concert began with Australian composer (indeed, Adelaidean!) Miriam Hyde’s Happy Occasion Overture. It is brimming with lyrical warmth and charm, and is a celebration in orchestral form. Written in a neo-romantic style, its graceful melodies and refined elegance evoke pastoral optimism, yet never become schmaltzy! It’s infrequently played and conductor Nicholas Braithwaite’s reading of it put a smile on everyone’s face from beginning to end.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Tuba is a total joy. If Braithwaite warmed our smiles with the Hyde, then he, the ASO, and tuba player Stanley McDonald stretched them to breaking point with the Vaughan Williams! Who knew the tuba could do what McDonald made it do? It turns out that it is not just an oom-pah-pah underdog instrument that strengthens a musical punchline – it is also a poetic soloist! The composition begins almost in Star Wars-esq fashion and later in the first movement the tuba solo shows the instrument’s lyricism and depth across its range. The romanza second movement is strongly pastoral as it begins with sweeping strings giving way to the tuba which soars above in a delightful tenor line. The final third movement begins almost immediately after the second with McDonald extracting a nicely articulated jaunty theme with even an astonishingly executed trill before finishing in a darker Germanic vein. Stanely McDonald is the Principal Tuba for the ASO, and it’s easy to see why he is. He is not yet twenty years of age and reportedly enjoys a wide range of musical styles and even plays in local jazz bands (on trombone and sousaphone no less!). And he is modest and has a sense of humour. He almost looked surprised by the audience’s strong positive reaction to his performance, and when he was presented with a beautiful floral arrangement from Tynte Flowers—as is the custom for soloists who perform with the ASO—he didn’t quite know where to put it. After all his hands were very full of the tuba (it takes two hands to hold a whopper!), so, with a cheeky grin on his face, he popped the bouquet into the bell of the instrument and the audience whooped with laughter.
The concert concluded with a nicely balanced and skilfully phrased performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 in B flat. Although written in the romantic era, it doesn’t ooze brooding Romantic tropes. It is pure classical joy and frequently channels Mozart, but with youthful exuberance. Schubert was only 19 when he wrote it—the same age as Stanley McDonald—and like McDonald’s playing, the symphony effervesces with youthful vim and vigour. The writing for horns in the second movement and bassoon in the third are especially lyrical and melodic, and the ASO came up trumps. But it’s not all emotional charm. There is also an emotional sensitivity to it, and the orchestration and catchy counterpoint are signs of Schubert’s phenomenal talent. It is elegant without being egotistical, a bit like McDonald.
What a concert – it blazed with delights!
Kym Clayton
When: 11 Jun
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Frontier Touring & MG Live. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 7 Jun 2025
I was checking into Sydney migrating to Australia in 1982 and sadly Cold Chisel was close to checking out. But their catalogue reverberated, and the songs were a huge part of my soundtrack while acclimatising to Australian ways. Cold Chisel was armed with a fistful of Don Walker songs like Choir Girl, Saturday Night and Khe Sanh. I, too, wanted to hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long but I didn't have the PTSD to do it. These and other Chisel songs - many band members collaborated on songs, including Jimmy - haunt me to this day on nostalgically lost weekends in Sydney’s pubs and lanes, and whenever they catch me by surprise on the radio.
Open heart surgery precipitated by a bacterial infection in late 2023 led to wildly premature obituaries of Jimmy Barnes’s stage demise. He appeared at Byron Bay’s Bluesfest in March 2024 and at some dates of the Red Hot Summer tour. And then he really hit the road. Jimmy eased in with the Hell of a Time tour comprising a more stripped-back intimate style, two months after his second hip replacement! The Big Five-0 tour late last year celebrated Cold Chisel’s 50th anniversary in a 16-show national extravaganza over one-and-a-half months - a grand nostalgic celebration with guest artists. Andrew Stafford wrote in The Guardian that there was a collective understanding that the Big Five-0 tour could be the last. Yet here we are, with Barnesy’s third tour in thirteen months! Phew!
The current 6-date tour celebrates Jimmy’s 21st studio album, DEFIANT, matching his unprecedented 21 number ones on the Australian album charts (15 as a solo artist and 6 with Cold Chisel). This tour is certainly not intimate and not entirely nostalgic, but it is familiar territory.
Opening act Taylor Sheridan was a soothing throat lozenge to Barnes’s true grit. He expressed huge gratitude for the gig of opening for this tour and for being a new dad. “Does life get any better than this?” He sang a love song to his hometown of Kyneton, Victoria, and another to his new baby, being nursed in the wings. A mate declared him to be a troubadour and that became the title of his self-produced debut album released last year. Sheridan’s guitar and body musically intertwine, his themes of whimsy and love are thoughtful and evocative. He won’t have to self-produce his next album after this gig. “You can remember my name - Taylor (Swift) and Sheridan (towels).”
The main event took the stage in the face of huge anticipation. A quick succession of familiar songs rippled through the audience. Choir Girl syllables were spat out with melodic indifference outweighed by industrial energy.
Now, he thought, for the moment of truth. Barnes sheepishly apologised that he is going to road-test songs from the new DEFIANT album and his hometown is the first live audience to hear them since the February release. Several times through the evening he genuinely reflected on his formative years in Elizabeth. The Glaswegian migrated with his parents and siblings in 1961 as Ten Pound Poms. Childhood violence, abuse and trauma is revealed in two poignant memoirs plus books of nonfiction short stories. Life at home didn't stabilise until his mom moved in with Reg Barnes from whom Jimmy takes his name. But the big break came when Don Walker, Ian Moss and other band members of Cold Chisel auditioned him when he was 16 and he decided to leave the shopping mall fist-fighting behind.
The new songs from the DEFIANT album are vintage Jimmy. While family life and hospital strife are new and important themes for a man who understands how precious life is, they are conveyed with familiar song construction and vocal power. Damned if I Do, Damned If I Don't - I've heard that one before. The ballad, Beyond The Riverbed, is an ode to married life in a metaphor flowing from his river front property 100 kilometres south of Sydney. Jimmy and Jane tied the knot 44 years ago and their love and mutual support was evident on stage with Jane helping out with the backup vocals.
The show returned to Cold Chisel territory with the crowd taking to their feet with Ride the Night Away and up and dancing with rapturous appreciation of Jonathan Cain’s, Working Class Man.
The third and final encore was Don Walker’s Khe Sanh. This is the wrong place for this song in the programme - the nuances were napalmed into oblivion by frenetic end-of-concert energy. Sadly, the bombing started sometime earlier in the evening and the Ian Moss’s melodic counterbalances were missing.
Jimmy Barnes, and his family, have been through a hell of a lot and we love him because he’s only got stronger because of it. He touched his damaged heart every time he sang the words love, heart or soul. While the voice isn’t the one that Cold Chisel heard in that audition over 50 years ago, and the new songs have some job to prove themselves, you can't have that gutsy power until you live the gutsy life. The songs and Barnes’s performance of them are embedded on the Australian psyche forever more.
Andrew Stafford thought “the last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone”, but I think there's several more taxiing up to the runway.
David Grybowski
When: 7 Jun
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Bookings: Sold Out Nation Wide
Tour Info: jimmybarnes.com
13 to 14 Jun - St Kilda, Australia
20 to 21 Jun - Brisbane, Australia
27 Jun - Sydney, Australia
28 Jun - Canberra, Australia
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 31 May 2025
And no sooner has it begun, and it’s over, and a new golden era for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is in full flight.
Of course I’m referring to the ASO’s Brahms Symphonies festival, and to the triumph that is the appointment of Mark Wigglesworth as the new Chief Conductor of the ASO and him leading the orchestra through what has been a magnificent performance of the four Brahms symphonies, and he conducted them all from memory!
The fourth and final concert in the series was eclectic in its programming: with the Brahms Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op.98, we heard Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and the Australian première of Sir Stephen Hough’s Concerto for Piano (the world of yesterday) with no other than himself at the piano!
The Prelude is a lush piece, rich with totally appealing melodies that unfold and sustains interest from the first to the very last note. Indeed, a cornucopia of melody is a feature of the entire program. Principal flute Kim Falconer plays the opening theme of the Prelude and her musicianship is totally exposed for everyone to enjoy, and she comes up trumps as the purest and most heady tones are coaxed from her instruments. Not to be outdone, principal clarinet Dean Newcombe enters soon after with equally intoxicating tones, and then concertmaster Kate Suthers produces astonishingly ethereal sounds on violin as the full orchestra unfolds. Wigglesworth doesn’t interfere with the Debussy’s plan although there is the occasional judicious rubato as if the orchestra is yearning to luxuriate in what Debussy offers. The performance is a joy.
Debussy’s Prelude came at a time when the dictates of German (and Russian) music were being pushed gently aside as composers started exploring and developing new structures and sounds. They of course would not have been able to do that without standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the same is true of Hough’s piano concerto. At Hough’s own admission, his The World of Yesterday concerto takes inspiration from those composers who have inspired him throughout his own career, but the concerto is not derivative. It starts earnestly in a romantic manner, and is filmic throughout (again, at Hough’s own admission), and it strives to lose its romantic and filmic bonds to become something else. An extended cadenza follows that is dizzying to watch and settles on a short-lasting melody that explores its tonality. The prelude and cadenza first movement segues almost without stop into a suite of variations on a waltz rhythm and Hough’s scoring is delicate, almost thin at times, and grandiloquent at others. The marriage of gentle percussion (such as xylophone, snare drum) and piano in the second and third movements is especially effective, and the brisk rising and falling passage work from both piano and orchestra adds to the ever-present impression of driving momentum. It’s as if the piece doesn’t want to finish and is ever searching out new ways to build on practises of the past and brand ‘today‘ and ‘tomorrow yet to come’ on them!
Hough again demonstrated remarkable musicianship and showed us why he is at the height of his pianistic powers and one of finest musicians around. The audience applause was generous, loud and appropriately lengthy. Hough and Wigglesworth embraced and their mutual respect and admiration for each other is palpable. Hough’s concerto was composed mostly during the pandemic and was co-commissioned by the ASO. What superb foresight from the ASO!
But, to remind us from where we have come, musically speaking, what better than to finish with Brahm’s uber -melodic fourth symphony, which is surely at the pinnacle of his musical output. It’s iconic opening is well loved, and well known by concert goers, and so it was mildly surprising but pleasing that Wigglesworth took it at a marginally slower and measured pace than perhaps we are used to . Again, he conducted the symphony from memory and never, if the reader will excuse the expression, ‘missed a beat’! The first movement features a lush string section which announces a melody to which we often return. A sort of oasis. Before finding its way back to this refuge, the composition frequently flirts with contrasting rhythms and tempi, but Wigglesworth ensured the ‘oasis’ was consistent and reliable, and the audience luxuriated in it: there were many closed eyes and gently swaying heads.
As has often happened in this festival, there was spontaneous applause from the audience at the end of the first movement. Dean Newcombe’s plangent entry on clarinet in the early bars of the second movement was sublime, and the bombast of the third movement had the audience on the edge of their seats. The third movement is marked allegro giocosa, and it is almost exhausting from a listener’s perspective, so much so that its exuberant ending could easily be a suitable end for the symphony, but Brahms had more to say. The allegro energico e passionato fourth movement begins a gentle ‘letting down’ after the explosion of energy in the third, and Brahms skilfully revisits thematic material from the previous movements before an explosive tutti that emphatically says ‘and now I am done’!
The woodwinds, horns and brass were excellent during the symphony, and indeed throughout the entire program, and it was fitting that Wigglesworth asked them to take first bows. Wigglesworth also singled out percussionist Sami Butler who mischievously held his triangle aloft to the delight of the audience who laughed heartily. The humour was reminiscent of the March 12, 1984, front cover of the New Yorker magazine.
Bravo ASO. Bravo Mark Wigglesworth. Bravo Sir Stephen Hough. What a magnificent series of concerts. The future looks grand!
Kym Clayton
When: 31 May
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 28 May 2025
The third concert in the ASO’s Brahms Symphonies series included the ever-sunny Strauss waltz On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Op.314, Grieg’s iconic Concerto for Piano in A Minor, Op.16, and Brahms’ Symphony No.3 in F, Op.90.
Mark Wigglesworth took the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra to new levels of artistry, and Sir Stephen Hough made the Grieg concerto sound newly minted, and he almost didn’t need a conductor!
The entire concert was unhurried, and whether it be the Strauss, the Grieg or the Brahms, every phrase was meticulously crafted, and every note was painstakingly enunciated. It was like listening to the three pieces for the very first time, and each seemingly shouted out ‘listen to me, really listen to me’!
What does one look for in a live music concert? There are likely numerous answers, but it is surely not to hear something performed the exact same way it has always sounded: predictability can be mind numbing, but extreme novelty can be aggravating. There’s a middle way in there somewhere, and Wigglesworth and Hough both found it, and their collaboration, mutual respect, and artistry was quite remarkable.
They have collaborated on previous occasions, both live and recorded, and performed concertos by Brahms, Rachmaninov, and recently Hough’s own piano concerto (which will feature in the fourth and final concert of the current Brahms Symphonies series).
Their previous collaborations have produced richly detailed and stimulating interpretations, with fresh and heartfelt insights, and tonight’s Grieg has added to that achievement. Hough performed with muscularity and careful use of the sustaining pedal, and the first movement cadenza was astonishing in its musicality. The audience burst into spontaneous applause when the movement ended, and Hough’s eyes slightly widened as he acknowledged the great joy he’d created. The second movement felt pacy and Hough embodied a free spirit at the keyboard as he wrested every distinctive rhythm and crafted new meaning into every carefully articulated phrase. This was a mere prelude to the final third movement and Hough and Wigglesworth’s body language enhanced the dance-like structures that pervade it. They lived the music – they were both lyrical and impactful.
The program began with the Blue Danube waltz, which has been heard countless times before by countless people, but it too sounded fresh. The bowing from the double basses was imposing, and the woodwinds were almost seraphic. Wigglesworth toyed with rubato, and every member of the ASO hung on every one of his beats. He smiled at them, encouraging them to enjoy the majesty of the moment, and they smiled back at him.
Brahms’ third symphony is a masterpiece and is well known for the bucolic melodies in the poco allegretto third movement. Wigglesworth took the symphony at an almost stately pace, with occasional bursts of pace and dynamism where needed. Throughout the woodwinds, horns, and brass were superlative, especially the clarinets and flutes. Kate Suthers again demonstrated why she is such a respected concertmaster.
This concert has been a real eye opener. The ASO, conductor Mark Wigglesworth and pianist Sir Stephen Hough provided transformed experiences of classical masterpieces! Bring on the next concert in the series!
Kym Clayton
When: 28 May
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall. 24 May 2025
The second concert in the ASO’s Brahms Symphonies series included Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin, Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor, Op.25, and Brahms’ Symphony No.2 in D, Op.73.
Again, Mark Wigglesworth led the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Sir Stephen Hough performed the concerto.
In the first concert there was a clear connection between the works on the program, but the connections in the second concert are a little more abstract: Wagner was suspicious of Mendelssohn (and Brahms to an extent) who in turn was lauded by Schumann who thought that Brahms was going to be the next big thing after Beethoven who was also revered by Wagner. The connections don’t really matter to the typical member of the audience: all they want is to be entertained with iconic music, and that is exactly what they got.
Wigglesworth showed his flexibility and broad experience throughout the program. From the carefully controlled dynamics of the Prelude to Lohengrin, with its exquisitely controlled long crescendos and decrescendos, through to the beautifully articulated dialogues between piano and orchestra in the Mendelssohn, to the exchanges between the woodwinds and strings in the Brahms, Wigglesworth demonstrated his command of it all.
Hough was again precise at the piano, but the romanticism of the concerto was never stifled. The three-way communication between Hough, Wigglesworth, and concertmaster Kate Suthers was a highlight.
The reading of the Brahms was ‘standard’ and Wigglesworth controlled the exacting dynamics. No instrument was given anything approaching a free rein, although the bowing of the principal viola was something to admire; passionate and exuberant. The audience enjoyed the first movement of the symphony so much that they broke into spontaneous applause when it ended. The orchestra took this in their stride and an unleashed almost plangent woodwinds in the second movement, gracious strings in the third and a spirited tutti in the final movement.
At the end Wigglesworth asked the woodwinds to take the first bow, followed by the horns, and then the brass before a full bow. Throughout, the audience clapped and cheered, and wolf whistled. They were indeed entertained with excellent performances of iconic music by an orchestra of which Adelaide can be rightly proud.
Kym Clayton
When: 24 May
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed