Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony

Eduardo Strausser
Conductor

The charismatic and energetic Brazilian conductor, Eduardo Strausser has gained a reputation for his intelligent programming and physical style on the podium. Plans for the 2022/23 season include returns to Antwerp Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Fundacion Musical Simon Bolivar, West Australian Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Messiah and debuts with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, NorrlandsOperan, the Halle Orchestra, Bamberg Symphoniker and North Carolina Symphony.

Previously Resident Conductor of Teatro Sao Paolo from 2014 – 2016, Eduardo has become an experienced opera conductor and productions in Sao Paolo have included Elektra and Carlos Gomes´ Fosca, as well as performances of The Nutcracker with the Balé da Cidade de São Paulo and a Stefano Poda production of Mahler Symphony No.1.

Most recently he led a new production of Leonard Ever’s Die Odyssee for Zurich Opera and other highlights include Tosca for Theater Magdeburg which he also conducted for Staastheater Hannover alongside productions including; Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Hansel and Gretel and Die Zauberflöte. Elsewhere he has also conducted La bohème for Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro and Teatro Verdi di Padova.

Image credit: Rodrigo Levy

Jay Emmanuel
Librettist / Director

Born in India and based in Australia, Jay is an internationally acclaimed performer, writer, and director; and is currently the Artistic Director of Encounter. Jay migrated to Australia in 2009 and is a graduate of the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris.

Jay’s recent writing includes Beneath the Music (premiere, June 2023) and highly acclaimed work Children of the Sea, presented at Perth Festival 2021. He recently featured in Why Not Theatre’s production of MAHABHARATA (Shaw Festival / Barbican - London) and the award-winning play COUNTING AND CRACKING (11 Helpmann Awards). In 2019, He was selected for the Australia Council for the Arts Future Leader Program (2019) and awarded an Australia Council Career Development Grant (2020).

Jay’s artistic practice is committed to community empowerment using participatory theatre-making processes through the community arts and cultural development (CACD) space to facilitate expression for communities to tell their stories.

Abimanjou Mathivannan
Actor

Originally from Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Abimanjou Mathivannan relocated to Australia at age 9 to build a more stable future with his family.

His passion for acting blossomed while making his debut in the 2021 world premiere performances of Jay Emmanuel’s Children of the Sea. Playing the character of Mir, Abimanjou is the sole actor in The Tides of Longing, accompanied by an orchestra and two choirs. This adaptation of the original play explores themes of hope, loss, and resilience in the face of adversity.

Besides acting, Abimanjou loves dancing, listening to music, singing, and volleyball. When he grows up, he wants to travel the world to discover different cultures and beliefs.

Image credit: Daniel James Grant

Voyces

Voyces is an ensemble that focuses on contemporary choral music, believing in its power to tell stories and unite audiences. Voyces is an auditioned ensemble consisting of some of Perth’s most talented choral musicians guided by Artistic Director, Dr Robert Braham OAM.

Voyces showcases works by Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Iain Grandage and Stephen Leek, alongside international composers including Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen and Ola Gjeilo. Voyces has gained a reputation of excellence in the choral sector, premiering national and international works, has toured extensively and has performed with artists such as the Song Company, The Gesualdo Six, Adele, John Butler, Katie Noonan & Björk.

Beyond performance, Voyces is a strong proponent of emerging composers and has showcased works by a number of local composers including Perry Joyce, Stefan Pugliese and Alex Turley. Voyces also runs a regular composition competition called Aspire which is open to emerging composers from around Australia.

Image credit: Nik Babic

WASO Chorus

The WASO Chorus was formed in 1988 and consists of around 100 volunteer choristers who represent the finest form of community music making, bringing together singers from all walks of life. They regularly feature in the WASO annual concert season, and are directed by Andrew Foote.

The Chorus has built an international reputation for its high standards and diverse range of repertoire. While its main role is to perform with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra the Chorus also maintains a profile of solo concerts, tours and community engagements.

The Chorus sings with the finest conductors and soloists including Asher Fisch, Simone Young, Stephen Layton and Paul Daniel. Recent highlights have included Mahler’s Second Symphony and Verdi’s Requiem. In 2019 the Chorus performed at the Denmark Festival of Voice and in 2018 toured China with performances of Orff’s Carmina burana. In 2020 they performed two Gala events on the Kalbarri Skywalk. Earlier this year the chorus was invited to Hobart to perform Brahms’ German Requiem with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO), the TSO chorus, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and members of the public, conducted by Simon Halsey.

Andrew Foote
Chorus Director

Gladys Chua
Répétiteur

Aquinas College Schola Cantorum

The Aquinas College Schola Cantorum is a choir of 44 choristers, currently consisting of boys between years 3-12. Known throughout the College as the Schola, it is a choral program unique to Aquinas College.

Formed in 2019, the Schola contributes significantly to the liturgical component of Aquinas College’s identity by singing at the daily Chapel Services, as well as at significant College events. In addition to these, the Schola also performs at the Saturday Vigil Mass at St Patrick’s Basilica, Fremantle every week during term time.

On average, each chorister spends nine hours a week making music in addition to their school commitments.

The Schola is regularly invited to perform in external events with other organisations. Opportunities have included singing with WASO, performing the National Anthem in Government House, and recording backing vocals for Andrea Corr’s Christmas Album. Several boys have successfully auditioned to sing as part of WA Opera’s Children’s Chorus for different operas, including Pagliacci, Carmen and Tosca.

Arvo Pärt
(b. 1935)

Fratres for String Orchestra and Percussion

One reason for the wide appeal of Arvo Pärt’s music may lie in a remark made by the composer himself in which he considered that his tintinnabuli style ‘is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers … The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.’

Complex and many-faceted could describe Pärt’s earlier compositional style, the modernist tendencies of which fell foul of Soviet authorities in his native Estonia during the 1960s. Pärt’s professional frustrations were compounded by his immersion in the Orthodox Christian Church, and he subsequently fell into a self-imposed eight-year creative silence during which he studied early music and plainchant. In the radical revision of his style that ensued, Pärt drew inspiration from music of the past, furnishing his musical language with such basic materials as drones and the simple triad, the three notes of which the composer has commented are ‘like bells’.

This tintinnabuli (from the Latin tintinnabulum for ‘small bell’) style has characterised Pärt’s most popular works to date. Fratres (the title, ‘Brothers’, has monastic connotations) was originally composed in 1977 as three-part music without fixed instrumentation; it now exists in various versions, including the arrangement for strings and percussion performed in this concert.

The serenity evoked by Fratres belies the precision of the music’s underlying systematic plan. The piece is based upon a single mode (for the technically minded, the scale built on the fifth degree of the D harmonic minor scale). Beginning on a stratospherically high E, the melodic line pivots first one, then two, and finally, three notes either side, each time adding two beats to the bar. This simple pattern is inverted, and the entire six-bar sequence is repeated eight times, each iteration a third lower; when every note in the foundation scale has served as a pitch centre, the music concludes its descent and arrives back at its starting point. An unchanging percussion motif punctuates each variation and an open fifth drone is sustained throughout. Each listener may read into this design what they will, however this writer is reminded of the words of T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Lorraine Neilson © 2023

Composition:
Composed in 1977, Fratres was arranged for string orchestra and percussion in 1983 and revised in 1991.

First performance:
This version was premiered on 20 April 1983 in Stockholm by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Neeme Järvi.

Dedication:
Dedicated to the memory of Estonian composer Eduard Tubin (1905–1982).

Instrumentation:
percussion and strings.

Lachlan Skipworth
(b. 1982)

Jay Emmanuel librettist / director

The Tides of Longing

Prologue: Waves and Restless Voices
Scene 1: I Made It!
Scene 2: Ammi’s Call
Scene 3: How Long There?
Scene 4: Two Brothers
Scene 5: Paans Hai Doori
Scene 6: Ayee Bird
Scene 7: Dusty Forlorn Paths
Scene 8: The Storm
Scene 9 (Coda): The Chota Kargosh

The Tides of Longing is a journey through the themes of hope, loss, and resilience in the face of adversity. It tells the story of Mir, a refugee boy who flees his war-torn homeland and travels via a network of people-smugglers to seek a new life in Australia. As he grapples with his past and an uncertain future, the musical narrative highlights the emotional and psychological impact of displacement and the experiences of those who have been forced to leave their homes.

In addition to Mir, who is played onstage by actor Abimanjou Mathivannan, the musical forces in The Tides of Longing propel the narrative in distinct ways. The children’s chorus evokes the fragile innocence of youth, throwing the darker themes of the work into stark relief. The adult chorus’ role is varied: it portrays Ammi, Mir’s mother who remains at home, and their longing to be reunited, and depicts the raw emotion of the adult world, the anger, the despair, and the violence. The orchestra conjures a range of natural environments in which the action takes place.

We begin with a nocturnal ocean scene, in which Mir is alone in his thoughts on the boat. A melody in the childrens’ chorus achingly calls, siren-like, above restless orchestral waves. We then meet Mir who arrives almost heroically, full of hope, but also oscillating between reminiscence and the present realities of his fraught existence. In desperation he calls out to his mother Ammi, and we receive her sorrowful reply from the chorus.

We then enter Mir’s memory and he narrates for us his childhood, in particular the complex relationship with his twin brother, before we hear two musical interludes, Paans hai doori and then Ayee Bird. From here the story’s tragic moods emerge with more horrific details of Mir’s journey emerging in the sung text despite his spoken attempts at clinging to happier memories.

The orchestra then heralds the arrival of an ocean storm threatening their boat, but above this the true terrors of Mir’s flight from home are revealed: he learns of the death of his father and brother at the hands of the army. Ammi’s pleas for him to run and never come back prompt a musical pivot to an immense outpouring of grief, and we are afforded time to reflect on these tragic events as the work draws to its poignant end.

Image credit: Tallulah Chong

Instrumentation:
two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes (2nd doubling cor anglais), two clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet) and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets and three trombones; timpani, two percussion, harp, celesta and strings.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840-1893)

Symphony No.5 in E minor, Op.64

Andante – Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
Valse (Allegro moderato)
Finale (Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace)

After completing his Fourth Symphony (1877), Tchaikovsky wrote to his former pupil Sergey Taneyev: ‘I should be sorry if symphonies that mean nothing should flow from my pen.’ He insisted that the Fourth definitely followed a ‘program’, even though, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on which he had partly modelled the work, it could not be expressed in words. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tchaikovsky’s own Fifth Symphony, composed in summer 1888, likewise could not ‘mean nothing’, and even if a precise meaning will probably never emerge, Tchaikovsky did leave clues as to the direction of his thoughts.

Fate and providence were certainly on his mind, having in mid-1887 spent two distressing months at the bedside of a dying friend. Later, in his sketchbook he verbally outlined a first movement whose slow introduction began with ‘total submission to fate’, followed by an allegro that introduced ‘murmurs, doubts, laments, reproaches’ before considering succumbing to ‘the embrace of faith’. He described this as ‘a wonderful program, if only it can be fulfilled’. Although no irrefutable evidence links this plan directly with the 1888 symphony, the Fifth’s main theme does lend itself to a musical personification of grim fate (in its minor form) and of beneficent providence (in its major form), and a journey from the first to the second is a plausible program, if not for the opening movement (which ends in the minor), then for the whole work.

The main theme (played at the outset by solo clarinet) also pays homage to the man Tchaikovsky called ‘the father of Russian music’, Mikhail Glinka. Tchaikovsky borrowed the germinal first eight-note phrase from Glinka’s opera A Life for the Czar, where it opens the second half of a melody sung in succession by all three principal characters in the first act trio. But Tchaikovsky develops Glinka’s melodic fragment (first sung to the words ‘Do not turn to sorrow’) into an entirely new motto theme whose subliminal transformations and literal reprises bind the symphony’s four movements together. The first transformation is into the dance-like theme of the Allegro con anima announced by clarinet and bassoon.

The horn melody in the second movement is one of the most beautiful in all of Tchaikovsky’s music. He actually scribbled on a sketch of this melody (in French): ‘I love you, my love!’ But it is more than just a love theme; it, too, is subtly related to the motto (of the motto’s first eight notes, it is a varied reworking of the last five). This connection is made explicit when the undisguised motto returns, portentously with trumpets and kettledrums, just before
the reprise of the love theme.

Tchaikovsky called the third movement a ‘waltz’, a modestly understated example compared with his great ballet waltzes, but one whose easy mood makes it a perfect structural foil to the slow movement’s passionate intensity. It may well be significant that he crafted the tune out of snippets of a Tuscan folksong, called La Pimpinella, that he heard in Florence in 1877, sung by (as he noted) a ‘positively beautiful’ young (male) streetsinger. Certainly significant, the waltz tune also audibly echoes the rhythm of the preceding movement’s soulful horn theme, of which it is essentially a faster, lighter reworking. The same rhythm also reappears in the sinuously exotic subsidiary tune introduced by the bassoon. But only once does the motto itself intrude on this pleasant reverie, from clarinets and bassoons, right at the movement’s close.

The motto returns fully, in major mode, as a solemn march, introducing the fourth movement, sumptuously scored with all the violins playing down low in unison with the cellos, passing next to the woodwinds, before trumpets and kettledrum signal the imminent Allegro vivace. Tchaikovsky energises the motto’s second, falling-scale element to create a new minor-key theme that launches further transformations and combinations of germinal fragments, underpinned by the quick tick-tock of bassoons, kettledrums and basses, plateauing out on a brilliantly shrill majorkey woodwind chorus. Winding down and then up again through more furious returns of the minor-key theme, a massive climax builds, breaking back into the now almost unbearably splendid march, the motto’s apotheosis capped at the last possible moment by a trumpet reprise of the first movement’s allegro theme.

© Graeme Skinner 2014

First performance:
17 November 1888, St Petersburg. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
26 October 1938. Malcolm Sargent, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
5-6 July 2019. Hendrick Vestmann, conductor.

Instrumentation:
three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani; strings.

Lucas O’Brien
Violin

When did you realize that you wanted to become a professional musician?

I was fortunate to find my path relatively early in life. Growing up, I knew I either wanted to be a violinist or a soccer player. In my teens it became clear that I showed more promise as a musician than a soccer player and I've never looked back!

What do you feel makes a successful performance?

For me, it's all about connecting with the audience. In this digital age, we have access to almost anything at our fingertips. One place where this digital medium falls short for me is in making genuine, empathetic connections with others in a vulnerable and safe way. I think live music epitomises this type of empathetic connection with others. As such, I measure the success of a performance by the level of connection I feel with others in the room. This is not only with my colleagues on stage but also with the audience and the energy I feel from them during and after the performance.

You’ve completed a Doctor of Musical Arts focusing on string quartets; how did this change your approach to chamber music?

Focusing my research on string quartets was a purely selfish decision! I absolutely love playing chamber music, especially with my WASO colleagues, because it is best shared amongst friends.

The legendary violin teacher Leopold Auer is well known for coining the phrase 'art begins where technique ends' and my research helped me to experience and understand this for myself.

If you could program your own concert what would you play and who would be the conductor?

I'm going to have to cheat a bit and give a couple of answers. I'm sure I'm not the first to think this but I'd love to do Wagner's Ring Cycle here in Perth with WASO and of course Asher Fisch conducting. The performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde that we did with Asher in 2018 remains one of my career highlights.

For a more symphonic concert, I'd program something Russian given my teachers were mainly Russian-trained, instilling a love of this music in me. I am yet to play Shostakovich's Symphony No.4 and am intrigued by its raw passion and energy. Since I love things done on a grand scale, I'd start the concert with Brahms' Violin Concerto, played by Gil Shaham (I'm hopeful this cancelled concert from our 2020 season may still happen in the future!). To conduct, I'd invite Vasily Petrenko to return to the podium with WASO. We did a Shostakovich symphony with him last year and it was electric!

Tell us about one of your passions outside of music.

My main hobby is enjoying Chinese tea. I was exposed to Gongfu Cha, the ceremonial act of enjoying tea, whilst in America working with a health practitioner. To me, Chinese tea has all of the complexity and depth of wine (and can be aged like wine). I also really enjoy the ritual aspect of Gongfu Cha; to me it is a form of meditation and an excellent lesson in mindfulness. The hardest part is resisting the urge to buy more teapots!

What is the best thing about being a musician in WASO?

I often pinch myself during concerts thinking about how I am able to make a living from doing what I love. Aside from being immensely grateful for the support required to make this a reality, I am also very lucky that being in WASO feels like being part of a big family. Having colleagues that are also some of my best friends adds personal meaning every time I share the stage with them. In my experience this camaraderie, combined with the ability to be a part of something bigger than yourself creates an ideal environment for world-class performance in any discipline.