Canberra’s première event was planned as a celebration, but left us with some big queries. The orchestra, once described by Simone Young as ‘like a youth orchestra, with wrinkles’, still reflected the enthusiasm of national music camps of old, and still demonstrated a magnificent corporate level of technical excellence. It was a rare treat to hear such lusciousness of tone, such front-of-the-seat rhythmic precision, as from last night’s thirty-four-member string section. Indeed, the very power of these massed leading string players, led by Katherine Lukey and Warwick Adeney (one half each), caused persistent balance problems for the remaining third, the winds and brass, stuck further back on Llewellyn Hall’s cavernous stage. The program itself was also more democratic than ideal. For one reason or another, it contained two substantial symphonies, no soloistic features, and Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture as hors d’oeuvre. This overture, sitting on the cusp of Beethoven’s famous classical-to-romantic transformation, allowed the AWO to strut its artistic wares, keenly urged on by its founding conductor, Alexander Briger. The world première of Paul Dean’s four-movement Symphony, which followed, was a more complex affair.

Dean’s connection with the AWO goes back to its founding, when he sat at the clarinet desk. So this commission emerged from ‘within the ranks’, and from a professional player who only turned his hand seriously to composition at an age when luminaries such as Mozart and Schubert were already dead. Not surprisingly, his score evidences in abundance a facility in generating convincing section textures, not just for winds but also for strings. With a brief to write for the same configuration of players as Schumann’s Second Symphony, he has exploited its textural potential to the limit. A plaintive piccolo (Lisa Osmialowski) and clarinet (Philip Arkinstall) duo, just before the Finale’s concluding ‘devastation’, provided one of the nicest soloistic moments in a work more inclined to larger blocks of interweaving sound. 

Paul Dean, composer, with Alexander Briger, conductor (photograph by Peter Hislop)

The other obvious virtue of Dean’s work is its authenticity of style. He is not his famous brother’s underling, nor a textbook-conforming acolyte of scholastic composition.  He writes, and he talks, about representation of the sounds of the Australian bush, particularly birds as harbingers of hope. But there remains a real question of how absolute or representational this Symphony is intended to be. Dean has spoken about initially writing a very depressing ‘Requiem for a Dying Planet’, but of then discarding much and moving on to something with rays of hope. In a note from March 2021, he wrote about the work as ‘a reflection of the times we live in ... so maybe it is like the world’, echoing Mahler. Those requiem intentions were not given as a subtitle for this première, though they do clearly still appear in parts of the work. The final phrase of the second movement’s draft, for instance, instructed a flute to play ‘with intense melancholy and resignation, “as if you are [the] last bird on earth, singing your last song”'.

Canberra’s rather sparse audience gave orchestra, conductor, and especially composer Paul Dean its warmest applause of the evening for this new Symphony. But that reception, I feel, was more for a complex work skilfully rendered than for a polished work significantly comprehended. The work’s concept is clearly vast, and beyond the capacities even of this excellent fifty-two-piece ensemble. Briger himself has suggested to Limelight that ‘after this première he [Dean] should re-orchestrate it for a full-size orchestra. It needs to have a massive string section because it’s so thick, like glue’. However, it also needs formal revision to sharpen its possibilities of reception as either a more positive Symphony, a darker Requiem, or even as an ultimate query about man’s ‘synchronicity with nature’, as Dean suggests enigmatically in his note of March. To my mind, as a Requiem this work hits the wounded spirit of our age best, and could be so (re)titled. As Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony demonstrates, audiences appreciate the honesty of hopelessness, rather than the politicised promise of false hope, or the academic’s tool-in-trade: the in-between of further unknowing.

In the concert’s second half, the AWO finally let it rip with Schumann’s Second Symphony. The first movement’s over-enthusiasm occasionally led to scrappy joins, but, after a hectic Scherzo, the players relaxed into Schumann’s glorious Adagio espressivo and a suitably celebratory, but unbombastic, Finale. Yes, after two years, and despite multiple challenges, the AWO was momentarily back, somewhat more Australian and less World. But what does the future hold, for orchestras like AWO or for ‘dying planets’ like Earth?

The Australian World Orchestra national tour continues in Sydney on 3 June 2021. The Melbourne finale on June 4 has been cancelled because of the current lockdown. Performance attended: June 2.