Memories of 60 years of Concert Going

When Bernard Heinze conceived school childrens' concerts back in the late 1930's, early 40's, our class of '41 journeyed by bus to the Adelaide Town Hall to hear our very first orchestral concert. After Toronto conductor Ernest MacMillan asked the section leaders to identify their instruments and play them individually, the orchestra launched into "Pop goes the weasel". The applause was so deafening that concert manager Athol Lykke persuaded Sir Ernest to play it again ... once again enthusiastic applause from the kids. I was hooked, and have been ever since!

At that time all five State orchestras were made up partly of semi-professionals for whom symphonic music was a side-line or a second job. It is on record that the great but nasty Georg Szell in Adelaide in 1938 remarked to the ABC General Manager, Sir Charles Moses, "Between the best they can offer and the least I am prepared to accept, there is an unbridgeable gap."!!! Nevertheless he apparently coaxed some respectable performances from our very early ASO. Later, when horn playing was still somewhat less than reliable Otto Klemperer was rehearsing when a cracked note was repeated three times. The maestro, convinced that the hapless horn player was offending deliberately, stormed off the podium loudly declaring "SABOTAGE"!!!

As the years rolled on standards improved exponentially and I recall the occasion when the ASO performed the demanding Mahler first Symphony with an elated Henry Krips addressing the audience in his inimitable Viennese accent. "Ladies and Gentlemen, little did I think I would live to see the day when our beautiful orchestra could perform a Mahler Symphony with eight FRENCH HORNS"!!! Since the very early days when the stock conductors were Heinze, William Cade, and Joseph Post, we have enjoyed a succession of luminaries - Sargent, Kubelik, Susskind, Barbirolli, Goossens, Brillen, Tate, to name but a few. When the Wayville Centennial Hall was used for a large Festival concert, an English critic described the location as "a cavernous hall on an agricultural showground" ... accurate, but not very flattering. The ASO has accompanied many fine soloists - Moiseiwitsch, Neveu, Kapell, Rostropovich, Tortelier, Jessye Norman, and the list goes on. The standard of playing is now world class, and to quote U.K. critic Roger Tredre after the 1998 Wagner Ring, "It's been joy from start to last, particularly the first-rate musicianship of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra"... and so say all of us!!!!

Having been an ASO season subscriber for over six decades, I'm sure I can't claim a State record, but I believe I belong to a rather fortunate and select group of long-term concert goers, and I look forward to the next decade.

lan Hodgson - ASO News