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
