Glorious Nights

Otto Tausk
Conductor

Dutch conductor Otto Tausk is Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor to the VSO School of Music. Internationally recognised for his dynamic musicianship and insightful interpretations, he has worked with leading orchestras and opera houses worldwide, conducting a diverse repertoire ranging from core symphonic works to contemporary compositions.

Highlights of the 2024/25 season include a Canadian tour with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, debuts with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and Buffalo Philharmonic, and returns to the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and Staatskapelle Weimar. This summer, Tausk will conduct the NDR Philharmonie Hannover at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.

Tausk has appeared as a guest conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Residentie Orkest, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Stuttgart Philharmoniker, the National Orchestra of Belgium, and orchestras across the UK including BBC Scottish Symphony and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with whom he performed Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben at the 2018 BBC Proms.

From 2012–2018, Tausk was Music Director of the Theater und Orchester Sankt Gallen, where he led numerous operas, including the world premiere of Annas Maske by Swiss composer David Hefti and the Swiss premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin. For his contributions to the arts in the Netherlands, particularly his leadership at Holland Symfonia (2007–2012), Tausk was awarded the prestigious De Olifant prize by the City of Haarlem.

Rachelle Durkin
Soprano

Australian/American soprano Rachelle Durkin began her career in Australia, winning The Herald Sun Aria, The Marianne Mathy Scholarship, and The Metropolitan Opera Award. She was a recipient of the prestigious Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and was accepted into the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.

Rachelle subsequently became an established solo artist at The Met, singing Norina in Don Pasquale (recorded live for Sirius Radio), Lisa in La sonnambula (recorded live Sirius Radio), Clorinda in La Cenerentola (recorded live Sirius Radio and DVD release), Mrs Schlesen in Phillip Glass’ Satyagraha (recorded live Sirius Radio and DVD release), Frasquita in Carmen, Masha in Pique Dame, First Flower Maiden in Parsifal (also at Salzburg Festival under the baton of Maestro Levine), and Young Girl in Moses und Aron.

2021/2022 engagements included Tytania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Governess (The Turn of the Screw) in Adelaide, Morgana (Alcina) in Canberra, and Musetta (La bohème) in Perth. In 2023, she returned to Opera Australia as Mrs Schlesen, to Perth as Musetta, and was soloist with the Sydney, Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. In 2024, she sang Donna Anna (Don Giovanni) in Hawai’i and was soloist for West Australian Opera, Opera Queensland, Australian Baroque, and the Australian Youth Orchestra. In 2025, she returns to Opera Australia as Musetta in their Sydney Winter Season of La bohème.

Rachelle’s other noteworthy performances include: Kumudha in John Adams’ A Flowering Tree for The Perth International Arts Festival; the title role in Alcina (c: Richard Hickox), Armida in Rinaldo (c: Trevor Pinnock) and Angelica in Orlando for Opera Australia. Rachelle received Helpmann Award nominations for all four of the aforementioned appearances. She received her fifth nomination for Haydn’s Armida with Pinchgut Opera (c: Antony Walker).

Other highlights have included Romance at the Met - Opera’s Most Romantic Moments (an iTunes exclusive with tenor Matthew Polenzani); soloist in Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 with Detroit Symphony Orchestra (c: Leonard Slatkin) and West Australian Symphony Orchestra (c: Asher Fisch), performances with Bryn Terfel and Lisa McCune at Leeuwin Estate Winery, and Gala Concerts with Placido Domingo and José Carreras.

WASO Chorus

The WASO Chorus was formed in 1988 and consists of over 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 Hugh Lydon.

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 Symphony No.8 and Britten’s War 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. In 2023, 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.

Last year the WASO Chorus performed with members of the WA Opera Chorus, the UWA Symphonic Chorus, Voyces and Aquinas College’s Schola Cantorum in WASO’s presentation of Mahler’s Symphony No.8.

Hugh Lydon Chorus Director
Gladys Chua Répétiteur

Andrew Schultz
(b. 1960)

Symphony No.4, Op.119

1. Expansive (Still, calm, distant and freely, then Faster: powerful and dramatic)
2. Circle Game (Fast – with wild andjoyous energy)
3. Chorale (Slow and elegiac, then Jubilant)
4. Gothic Burlesque (Fast, crisp, playful, then Ironic, forceful, grotesque)

Andrew Schultz’s Symphony No.4 is a 35 minute work in four movements and was commissioned for the West AustralianSymphony Orchestra by Geoff Stearn. The world premiere performances are given by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Otto Tausk at Winthrop Hall, Perth on 20 and 21 June 2025. The work was composed at the composer’s home in Sydney’s beachside Bronte over 2024, and completed on the last few days of that year.

Composer’s Note
Near and far. Foreground and background. Moving towards or away.

The music in my new Symphony is laid out in space and time with each listener’s ears the centre of the universe. Each movement begins with bells – metal wind chimes in the first movement, wrist bells in the second, suspended shells in the third, and zils (or finger cymbals) in the fourth. But the listener may hardly notice these bells, as they are mostly in the background and distant. They are, nonetheless, a starting point. Just as for me – a tinnitus sufferer – there are always high-pitched bell-like sounds in my head – filtered out by my brain, mostly, but occasionally there unsummoned when I’m tired or hot, and also there when I decide to listen to them to see what they are up to!

The first movement is marked Expansive, and is by turns dramatic and reflective, and is the longest of the four movements. Some years ago, I was standing by the side of a beautiful lake near the Arctic circle – a serene calm moment in early spring – sunny but cold. On the opposite bank of the lake there were big cliffs covered entirely in ice. All at once the huge ice sheets shifted then collapsed into the water and more kept coming until the whole cliff-side was free of ice. The sound arrived slowly, well after the awesome visual effect. Then, a massivewave of displaced water spread across the lake from the ice towards me. I was high up and safe but the sudden chilling contrast from calm stillness to majestic powerful motion is something I often think about and is what I have tried to capture, especially in the work’s opening few minutes and in the gentle off-stage echoes of the French horn.

The short second movement is a Circle Game marked Fast – with wild and joyous energy, and took its origins in research for a short work to celebrate East Timor and its independence struggle. The piece is based on an ancient Fatuluku children’s circle-game chant from Lautein, East Timor, as documented in Ros Dunlop’s book, Sounds of the Soul – Lian Husi Klamar, 2013. There is apparently no fully accurate translation for the text, which is in a largely lost language. My own amateur linguistic research with an old Fatuluku dictionary from Portugal suggests that it celebrates the rhythms of corn husking. But the chant is apparently still used by children in a fast-paced circle game with graphic hand and face actions, as well as virtuosic patter text.

The Chorale of the third movement is slow and elegiac. It is mostly simple music in which the expressive rise and fall of the musical swells are interrupted by reverent moments of silence or semi-silence. The resonant swells are like waves but also like the measured and steady breaths of meditation.

The fourth movement, Gothic Burlesque, is fast and plays, as the name implies, with ideas of the gothic, the macabre and the grotesque. It sits as a kind of commentary on the other movements, as well as on the grand guignol that other composers from Mozart through Berlioz and Verdi have made memorable.

By way of background, this is the first of my symphonies not to have an explicit subtitle:

Symphony No.1 (1998) was subtitled, ‘In Star Time’ and was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 1998. It is a three-movement choral-orchestral work with various texts especially from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The work takes its influence partly from Berio’s reinvention of the symphony in his epochal Sinfonia from 1967.

Symphony No.2 (2008) was subtitled, ‘Ghosts of Reason’ and is an orchestral work in one movement whose title alludes to both a psychological self-portrait and to Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in which he shows the mind of the artist symbolically besieged by frightening bats and owls. The work was commissioned by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Symphony No.3 (2012-13) carries the subtitle of ‘Century’. It is a three-movement work commissioned by the ACT government for the Centenary of Canberra and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. In its three movements, it draws on ideas of reflective personal expression and dramatic public creation as embodied by Griffin’s bold designs for the new capital city. The personal and the public, the abstract and the literal, are intertwined throughout.

So, whilst various subtitles occurred to me with this new work, none in the end seemed to me to capture the range of emotional complexity of the musical argument that it embodies – it is a work that in its four movements certainly embraces subtle references and even outright quotations from other composers but is also completely based in the personal and original inner dialog that a purely abstract work allows a composer to create. To me, that ambivalence of possibility in the symphony holds a unique and exciting position in musical genres – Janus-like, looking forward and backward at once.

What Marx said about history seems also to apply to music and, in my case, to the process of writing a symphony: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (Karl Marx – 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). What Marx describes is exactly both the puzzling conundrum and exciting challenge that confronts a symphony composer in territory that in some ways is jejune and well-trodden but in many other ways offers endless imaginative possibilities. To borrow from Marx again – admittedly with him now sounding like a psycho-musicologist: people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances that already exist, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, two percussion, harp and strings.

Claude Debussy
(1862-1918)

Nocturnes

I. Nuages
II. Fêtes
III. Sirènes

Debussy completed Nocturnes on 15 December 1899 at three in the morning,and it was first performed in 1900. In more than a symbolic sense, however, it can be considered the first major work of the 20th century. It contains many of the features which mark a break with the 19th century: a subtler sense of form, non-directional harmony, less assertive melody, and the elevation of the importance of orchestral colour. As foreshadowed in Debussy’s earlier works, there is an acceptance of sound as something to luxuriate in, rather than a Classical-Romantic notion of sound as something to be mobilised in the pursuit of a statement or climax.

The Nocturnes were originally conceived as a triptych, Scènes au crépuscule (Scenes at twilight), inspired by poems by Henri de Régnier. Then, in 1894, Debussy wrote to the Belgian violinist Ysaÿe:

'I am working at three nocturnes for violin and orchestra that are intended for you; the first is scored for strings, the second for three flutes, four horns, three trumpets and two harps; the third combines both these groups. This is, in fact, an experiment in the various arrangements that can be made with a single colour – what a study in grey would be in painting.'

The reference to painting is notable. In few other works is the epithet ‘impressionist’, borrowed from painting, more appropriate. Debussy did not intend the work’s title to be understood in the sense of a Chopin nocturne; it has more to do with a series of Whistler paintings of the same name.

The programmatic intent of these works is illustrative, without the emotional involvement of the late-Romantic tone-poets. ‘Nuages [Clouds] renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white’– the composer’s words find musical expression in the slowly changing background of rootless, floating chords which underlie the recurring tone of the cor anglais. Classical-Romantic distinctions between theme and texture are irrelevant in the smooth accompaniment; the cor anglais call never evolves into a melody. There is a whole new range of string colours here – delicate combinations of bowed and pizzicato effects, harmonics, nonstandard divisions of the string forces. A complete change of colour and a new pentatonic theme on flute and harp mark an obvious new section in the music, and the movement closes with merely a résumé of the opening material. There is no progression to a clearly marked cadence at the end, but rather a gradual disintegration of elements, as the cor anglais motif breaks down into smaller and smaller particles.

In complete contrast with Nuages and its ‘study in grey’, Fêtes (Festivals) gives us an almost kaleidoscopic display of momentarily bright colours. Once more the composer supplies a description:

'Fêtes gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling, fantastic vision) which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains persistently the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm.'

Sirènes (Sirens) evolves almost as a continuum; it swells and ebbs, rather than marking out a path; the melody grows and decays by the addition or alteration of small details. It is understandable how turn-of-the-century listeners, accustomed to more definition in form, could have regarded this music as impressionistic. It is possible that the use of wordless female voices in this last Nocturne was suggested to Debussy not only by Régnier’s L’Homme et la sirène, but also by Swinburne’s poem Nocturne, in which love is symbolised by a mermaid rising from the sea. Debussy wrote that this last movement ‘depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by moonlight…the mysterious song of the sirens as they laugh and pass on’.

Within the value system of the Classical- Romantic period, Debussy’s music was at first seen by some as negative, even morbid. Fluent rather than dramatic, plastic rather than constructed, it is the very antithesis of the positive striving of, say, a Beethoven or a Bruckner. Yet, Debussy’s innovations laid the foundations for a new ethos in Western music and for new techniques of musical language, opening up for the 20th century many new vistas for exploration.

G.K. Williams
Symphony Australia © 1998

First performance: Nuages and Fêtes first performed 9 December 1900, Concerts Lamoureux, Paris; Camille Chevillard, conductor. Complete work premiered 27 October 1901.
First WASO performance: 19-20 October 1956. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor and Moongana Singers (Sirènes).
Most recent performance: 23-24 March 2018. Asher Fisch, conductor and Women of the WASO Chorus.
Instrumentation: three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, percussion, strings.

Francis Poulenc
(1899-1963)

Gloria pour Soprano solo, choeur mixte et orchestra

I. Gloria
II. Laudamus te
III. Domine Deus
IV. Domine fili unigenite
V. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei
VI. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris

Editions Salabert (Universal Music Publishing Group). “By arrangement with G. Ricordi & Co. (London) Ltd.”

Two clear phases are usually distinguished in the development of the art of Francis Poulenc: the first, musically irreverent, light hearted, perhaps shortwinded; the second, serious, spiritually searching, marked by more ambitious themes and a heartfelt lyricism of some stamina. The turning-point, it is said, was the death of Poulenc’s close friend, the composer and critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud, who was killed in a car accident in 1935. Poulenc then set out on a pilgrimage to Rocamadour, in southcentral France, where a statue of the Virgin carved out of blackwood inspired his first religious work, the Litanies à la vierge noire (1936). The composer described this time as one ‘where I was seeking to drop roots into the very depths of my being’, and certainly the music which followed reflected a greater depth and seriousness.

But the division of Poulenc’s career should not be too sharply marked. Not all his religious music is deeply serious in tone, nor is his serious music to be found only in his religious works. The Gloria, one of his last works, reminds us of the dangers of compartmentalising his music. It is, in places, irrepressibly, almost jauntily cheerful. So painless is this praise of God that some critics have labelled it sacrilegious. Replying to the criticism, he said, ‘As I wrote it, I was simply thinking of those frescoes by Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues; and also of some solemn Benedictine monks I once saw playing football …’

No wonder laughter and high seriousness are often inextricably linked, as James Harding has written, in the same work by Poulenc. This is the composer who loved to go to the circus, and loved the popular music of the cabaret, the brass band and the dance orchestra. But he said of his choral religious music that he’d ‘put the best and most genuine part of myself into it … I have a feeling that in that sphere I’ve really produced something new.’

The musical form of Poulenc’s Gloria reflects his selective interest in the music of the past and his assessment of what he does best. Setting the Gloria from the Mass on its own harks back to the practice of both medieval and Baroque composers, and the division of the text into separate movements is similar to the ‘cantata-mass’ convention used by Vivaldi in his celebrated Gloria and by J.S. Bach in the Gloria of his Mass in B minor. But here the resemblance ends – Poulenc writes for a soloist, but she is given no elaborate display or coloratura arias; instead she leads and alternates with the choral mass, in a re-creation of the ancient antiphonal relationship of the priest leading the people.

The choral writing itself is almost entirely homophonic, in block chords, like most of Poulenc’s writing for choir. One of his early teachers, the composer Charles Koechlin, recognised that his pupil had no gift for counterpoint, and set him the exercise of studying Bach’s chorales and making his own harmonisations. Koechlin had spotted Poulenc’s talent for fresh, clear and uncluttered setting of words. Poulenc became a master of ear-tickling and emotionally affecting shifts of harmony. He departs from tradition by not setting the final clause of the Gloria text, ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu …’ in the almost compulsory fugal manner – indeed, he doesn’t even end with these words, preferring to stress the elevation of the Son to high holiness, and the prayer for mercy.

Poulenc’s very suggestive tempo indications, printed below, convey the flavour and contrasts of the Gloria: ‘Very lively and joyful’, ‘Very slow and calm’, ‘Unusually calm without dragging’, warning against any sentimentality in his intensely reflective devotion. The pungency of some of the orchestral sound of the Gloria contains some of Poulenc’s characteristic ‘jibes and salutations to other composers’, in this case Stravinsky, who influences his later compositions more and more. The Stravinsky reference is no accident, since the Gloria was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, and dedicated to the memory of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky and his wife. In 1930, Koussevitzky had given the first performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which he had commissioned, and which was dedicated to the Glory of God and to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The same orchestra gave the first performance of Poulenc’s Gloria on 20 January 1961, conducted by Charles Münch.

Abridged from a note by David Garrett © 1998

First performance: 20 January 1961, Boston. Charles Münch, conductor and Adele Addison, soprano.
First WASO performance: 17 August 1976. David Measham, conductor.
Most recent performance: 7-8 June 2013. Yan Pascal Tortelier, conductor. Sara Macliver, soprano.
Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes (2nd also doubling piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba; timpani, harp and strings.

Dr Philip Everall

Your Wesfarmers Arts Digital Pre-concert Talk for Glorious Nights is delivered by Dr Philip Everall.

Philip Everall is a bass clarinettist from Perth, Western Australia who has performed in venues such as the Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and Clancy’s Fish Pub. After undergraduate studies in Perth, Philip relocated to pursue a Master of Music from the Amsterdam Conservatorium, and then a Master of Contemporary Performance from the Manhattan School of Music. His teachers included Harry Sparnaay, Michael Lowenstern, and David Krakauer.

As an active freelancer, Philip has performed with ASKO/Schoenberg Ensemble (NL), Sequitur (USA), etica (AUS), and was a founding member of loadbang (USA). Also in demand as an orchestral musician, he has performed with the West Australian, Adelaide, Tasmanian, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, as well as Orchestra Victoria and the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Philip holds a PhD from Edith Cowan University for his research into modern techniques for bass clarinet, and is Lecturer in Music; Head of Woodwind at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.