Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. St Peter’s Cathedral. 20 Mar 2026
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra has a proud history of performing in St Peter’s Cathedral: through practised experience they know and understand how to use its cavernous acoustic to best effect—balancing placement, dynamics and tempo to avoid blur. For the opening Cathedral Series concert, the ASO presented a compact baroque program (seventy minutes, no interval): Pisendel’s Imitation of the Characters of the Dance alongside Handel’s ever-popular Water Music.
Like any cathedral, St Peter’s stone surfaces and vaulted ceilings create generous resonance and long reverberation—ideal for choral and brass textures, but challenging for fast, intricate writing. Directing from the harpsichord, Erin Helyard managed these conditions with assurance, shaping a performance of clarity and charm.
Composed somewhere in the period 1725-1735, Pisendel’s suite comprises eight compact dance-inflected movements that traverse a variety of contrasting musical colours and moods that quickly change from one to the other. The overall impact on the listener is one of heightened energy and gentle excitement. The woodwind was especially alluring. The composition saw the debut of a newly constructed ‘baroque conducting staff’, which was a predecessor to the modern baton. Elyard quipped that the ASO’s production team created it with the help of materials sourced from Bunnings and Spotlight! It is an imposing piece of kit and percussionist Sami Butler yielded it with vigour and precision. (It is now likely to go into storage along with the giant Mahler hammer used in the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No.6!) Elyard also quipped that Butler didn’t fall into the same trap that Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully did when he accidently stabbed his foot with his conducting stick mid-performance which became infected and he subsequently died of gangrene!
Quite simply, Handel’s Water Music is joyous. It was composed for King George I and was first performed on a barge on the River Thames in the presence of the King. He was so delighted by the piece he commanded it be played again, in its entirety, several times. The composition comprises twenty-two separate short pieces divided into three suites, and the whole thing comes in at around fifty-minutes, but it always seems much quicker than that. It is redolent with catchy and hummable tunes, vibrant instrumentation, varying tempi and rhythmic structures. It is bright, festive and ceremonial, and it never fails to delight. The third suite features recorder, and anyone labouring under the misapprehension that the recorder is an instrument of torture is soon disavowed of that. In the expert hands of Brendan O’Donnell, it sounds sublime. Elyard set a brisk pace for the third suite that had David Khafagi and Martin Phillipson on trumpet playing with superb articulation that was crisp and without excess. Elyard knows better!
The large audience left feeling content, relaxed and appreciative of beautiful music having been played superbly.
Kym Clayton
When: 20 Mar
Where: St Peter’s Cathedral
Bookings: Closed
