Heroes and Revolutionaries

While protestors descended on the Coalition’s federal election campaign launch at one end of South Brisbane’s Grey Street on Sunday, heroes and revolutionaries from across time were rising up on the other end thanks to the return of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s Music on Sundays program.

Delayed by the Brisbane floods, the beloved afternoon music series kicked off its 2022 program with music of fire, passion, and sublimity beyond anything the 100-strong voices down the street could replicate.

“Thank you for being so patient,” QSO cellist Craig Allister Young said to the almost packed QPAC Concert Hall auditorium of devoted music lovers.

“Obviously the first we couldn’t do because the building was underwater. Actually, it was going to be an amazing concert, you missed an amazing concert. In fact, the second violins were so excited, it’s the first time in 75 years where we’ve done a concert of dance music where the second violins did not have to play offbeat in the Blue Danube.”

Concert host Guy Noble entered stage left wearing a raincoat and nursing an equally quick wit. The audience responded with a ‘spontaneous’ standing ovation courtesy of a gentle nudge by Mr Young.

A Music on Sundays program is always a crowd-pleaser but the added surprise with this concert was that the 82-member QSO was being led by the first international conductor to work with the flagship company since before Covid hit two and a half years ago - American-born and German-based conductor Jonathan Stockhammer.

Stockhammer threw his whole body into the 90-minute program of nine works inspired by heroes and revolutionaries from Napoleon to Robin Hood, Vladimir Lenin, western gunfighters, delirious lovers, war heroes, and the fight of the Swiss for liberation from Austria in the 13^th century.

American composer Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1, set a cracking pace to begin the program. Her tribute to ‘women who take risks and are adventurous’ was written in 1987 for brass and percussion in response to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and was a powerful inclusion.

The big guns soon followed, with the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Rossini’s Overture to William Tell, but in between these was Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino in D major for Flute and Orchestra, and a huge moment for flautist Alison Mitchell who was playing the piece for the first time with an orchestra.

“There’s another little thing you should know about the piece,” Alison Mitchell said. “Cecile Chaminade was jilted by her lover and he happened to be a flute player, now she wrote this piece so that he couldn’t play it.”

Mitchell proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could, mastering the virtuosic passages.

Australian composer Miriam Hyde’s Heroic Elegy was a highlight of the second half of the program along with the final work, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture which was written in 48 hours after the Russian composer was asked to write something for the 37^th anniversary of the October revolution.

The Adventures of Robin Hood Symphonic Suite by Korngold, and the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz were included along with Elmer Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from the movie The Magnificent Seven, which Jonathan Stockhammer introduced simply by saying: “This is not an endorsement of smoking”.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and educational concert and definitely the best end of Grey St to spend a couple of hours on Sunday.

Debra Bela