A Symphony for
The ASO 1936-1989
ROGER KNIGHT,
CANNOT CONDUCT in
The heritage of that orchestra —assuming the plans
come to fruition —will certainly be a formidable one. My own first acquaintance
with the ASO (at that time going under the name of the South Australian
Symphony Orchestra) was back in October 1968. The conductor was, of course,
Henry Krips, but the soloist was the incomparable Janet,
Baker, and she sang Mahler in
what even then, to my cars jaded from a decade of the indifferent sound
of London's Festival Hall, struck me as the marvellous
acoustic of
Conductors over the years have likewise been a
formidable bunch. Apart from the ubiquitous Krips (whose
memoirs of taking the ASO' around half the country towns of
An orchestra with an illustrious past and a present
in which by general agreement there has been a most welcome revival of
standards — where does it go from here!
A return —promised for 1990 — to its historic homein the Town Hall (and to a Town Hall with
decent foyers and decent facilities at last, thanks to the about-to-commence
final stage of the restorations)
will mean that the ASO sound will he heard as it hasn't been except
on its rare escapes from the Festival Theatre — for a decade or more. The
immediacy and 'presence' of the orchestrain its
new surroundings will
come as
a very agreeable surprise to an audience which the present ASO management has
shown all impressive capacity for building up again after the doldrums of the
early 1980s. Back in 1936 the ABC's first concert., attracted a mere 161
subscribers (though of course the total audience was swelled considerably by
casual ticket purchases) while by the time I arrived here in the 60's it was
virtually standing room only unless you'd had the luck to inherit a
subscription from a sadly departed great aunt. The ASO is now basking in the highest
renewal rate for a decade. with 300 new subscribers this year to its prestigious Master Series — with a strong,
suggestion that those who have come to hear a few concerts have sufficiently
liked what they have heard to stay for more. What the ASO is now aiming to run
for 1990 is a major matinee series directed especially to the much-valued
older subscribers. The fact that the town Hall has an excellent gallery
— some would say with the sound in the house — ought also to make it
possible to make big appeal
to the young and impecunious (this years Meet the music series at the Elder Hall at the innovative time of 6. 30 is also
partly directed a t a similar audience
Programming
of course is always likely to remain a bone of contention. The 1989 season
offers a rich feast of classical favourites ranging
from Beethoven's Ninth through to Mahler's First with a very great deal of
well-loved Mozart. Tchaikovsky. Rachnianinov. Elgar and Dvorak in between. A little too well
loved perhaps. for all tastes, and it is not necessary to belong to the Stockhausen brigade to feel that a
little more adventure — without abandoning subscribers favourates
— would not come amiss. That Haydn Symphony, for instance, is
no longer much of a Surprise - and he had written 93 often rather less explored
ones, before he got that far. The ASO's increasing
integration into
State
Opera and, this year for the first time outside a Festival, for the Australian Opera and Ballet as well. What is
also very significant is that the ASO is beginning, to establish a recording
profile It has already
produced its version of the Shostakovich 8th under the baton of Nicholas
Braithwaite — a neat reward for some thoughtful programming for the 1988
season — and will this year put on disc the same composer's 7th
(Love Concert 5 and 6
May). It has also in
the bag, a record of concertos (including the brilliant Bartok
second) with 19-year-old, multi-award winning violinist Xiao Dong Wang, a
graduate of
my distinguished colleagues on The Advertiser but from the major record
magazines as well.