STACK #244 February 2025

FEATURE MUSIC

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s grand return to the renovated Opera House Concert Hall in July 2022 was a moment of celebration. Now, their historic performance, led by SimoneYoung, is captured on vinyl. RESURRECTION!

20-24 July 2022 were special dates in the Australian classical music calendar. It was time to – metaphorically – raise the roof of the Sydney Opera House. The venerated Concert Hall had been closed for extensive acoustic renovation. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, who regularly use the venue, had been dormant for some time, what with the intervention of COVID and the Concert Hall’s continuing renovations. So, when July finally arrived, and the orchestra was back in its first home, now with the great Australian conductor Simone Young AM at their helm, it was time to celebrate, “time to re-establish the community that has been so hard to come by in the last two years”, as Hugh Robertson noted in his programme note. And what better to do this with than a pair of pieces of music – one new, the other ‘heritage’. Aboriginal musician – composer, didgeridoo player, instrumentalist, and vocalist – William Barton, was commissioned to write a new

piece for the opening. Titled Of the Earth , it is a tribute to Australia, to Barton’s homeland. This is beautifully evocative music: the wind and brass “represent the wind on the side of a hill flowing through the spinifex grass of Kalkadungu country” writes Barton; a choir sings a Welcome to Country; there is a passing reference to Ave Maria (a song sung by Barton’s mother). Evocative in a more grandiose way is the 80-minute Symphony No. 2 by Mahler, which comprised the rest of the concert programme. Written between 1888 and 1894 and depicting the Resurrection, which gives the symphony its nickname, it is scored for huge forces: a large complement of strings, double the number of woodwind section including ten horns and ten trumpets (some of them off stage), a battery of percussion, a choir, and two vocal soloists. This is awe-inspiring music, and the performances on those red-letter days were equally spine-tingling. customary for 19th century symphonies, a large brass

Simone Young AM Photo credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

The recording of that occasion marks the first time both Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony appear on one of the world’s oldest and most venerated labels, Deutsche Grammophon. “This is a sound for the generations – for the next hundred years…” wrote Peter McCallum in the Sydney Morning Herald . It can now be preserved forever. Cyrus Meher-Homji

The recording by Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra of the concert which marked the re-opening of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall in July 2022 is released on Deutsche Grammophon CD and vinyl on Feb 14.

William Barton Photo credit: Keith Saunders

FUN FACTS

Gustav Mahler was born into a Jewish family in Bohemia. He was one of 12 children, five of whom died in infancy. Mahler had a phobia with the number nine. Beethoven and Schubert before him had died after writing nine symphonies. So, when he came to write his ninth, he called it Song of the Earth and didn’t give the symphony a number! Some of the percussion instruments used in the performance of William Barton’s Of the Earth were crafted from the timbers of the old Concert Hall stage, some from wood leftover from the construction – a true confluence of the old and the new.

49