Category Archives: Feature Articles

Concentration Camp Music

 

by Neville Cohn

 

 

 

Francesco Lotoro

Francesco Lotoro

In the closing months of Word War II, a platoon of soldiers led by a young South African – then-23-year-old Major Gideon Francois ‘Jake’ Jacobs – parachuted on to the island of Sumatra to liberate the civilian inmates of a Japanese internment camp for whom Jacobs would ever after be known as ‘the man who came from heaven’. Jacobs subsequently became military governor of Sumatra, going on to a distinguished career in South Africa as academic and politician.

 

 

Karel page from NONETT written on hygienic paper in the Pankrac' prison

Karel page from NONETT written on hygienic paper in the Pankrac' prison

 

 

Shortly before Jacobs’ arrival, the inmates of that camp had given a performance of choral miniatures. That long-ago performance, and the rehearsal preparation that came before it, was an attempt by two remarkable women to counter the effect of despair, boredom and illness that were all-pervasive in the camp.  Norah Chambers and Margaret Dryburgh, a missionary, had set the ball rolling by painstakingly notating versions of popular classics on scraps of hoarded paper – the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Grieg’s Morning from Peer Gynt, Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude and Dvorak’s Largo movement from the New World Symphony. (In an astonishing instance of synchronicity, a woman in the Ravensbruck concentration camp also arranged the Dvorak piece for women’s choir.)

 

At that unique concert in the Sumatra camp, the audience consisted of Japanese guards and internees. The ‘vocal orchestra’ singers, most frail from starvation and illness, were not strong enough to stand. Instead, they sang while sitting down. And as fellow-internee nursing sister Vivian Bullwinkel recalled, “we experienced a wonderful surge of optimism and hope – and that was a real comfort.”

 

There were also internment camps in Australia and the UK. After the promulgation of Germany’s anti-semitic Nuremberg Laws in the years leading up to World War II, numbers of German and Austrian Jewish musicians were granted political asylum in the UK. But when war broke out, their formal status changed from refugee to that of enemy alien. Some remained in internment camps in the UK but others were sent by boat to detention camps in Australia. The most famous of these ships was the Dunera and among the detainees, who came to be known as the Dunera boys, were Rabbi Boaz Bishopswerder of the Berlin Reform Synagogue who used his time on board ship to compose his Fantasia Judaica  for violin and piano. And, while detained in Tatura, the rabbi’s son Felix Werder wrote his Symphony No 1, eventually becoming one of Australia’s most respected musicians.

 

 

Theresienstadt

Theresienstadt

 

 

On the other side of the world in a German Stalag in Silesia, a French POW, trying to stave off boredom, embarked on a composition to be played by three fellow POWs and himself as pianist. It’s written for an instrumental ensemble not often encountered in mainstream classical music – piano, violin, cello and clarinet. And the composer, ever practical, carefully avoided the use of any notes which did not function properly on the ramshackle instruments that were all the players had at their disposal at that most unusual premiere. The composer was Olivier Messiaen and the work, now known to millions, was A Quartet for the End of Time. Of all music created in prisons of one sort or another, this work is almost certainly the best known. And in Japanese POW camps in Taiwan and Manchuria, Colonel Edmund J. Lilley countered the soul-destroying boredom of captivity by writing a set of American songs.

 

But during World War II, far and away the greatest amount of music of many kinds and of varying quality was composed in nazi concentration camps. But works were also composed in a variety of other detention facilities such as military prisons and conventional POW camps across Europe as well as in the UK. One can only marvel at the power of the creative impulse that enabled musicians to write music in an environment devoid of compassion, camps which, at their worst, were like horrifying anterooms to Hell.

 

It is very largely due to the tireless efforts of Francesco Lotoro  that so much of this music has been retrieved from near-oblivion, much of it now available on compact disc. Lotoro points out that “the level of creativity in a camp such as Theresienstadt was so great that, in order for the only piano there – a battered upright instrument – to be available to composers and pianists in an equitable way, a roster had to be drawn up allowing each musician to have use of the piano for thirty minutes at a time.”

 

Twelve CDs have now been released and Lotoro envisages at least another 12 compact discs to record all the music deriving from concentration camps.

 

Lotoro is an Italian-born pianist, conductor and music historian. Rescuing and recording music written in prisons has become his life’s work. But Lotoro points out that he is not the first musician to have taken on this work. Before he came on the scene, others were trying to conserve and catalogue music from the camps. He cites, for instance, Aleksander Kulisiewicz.

 

 “He was a trained singer in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and a victim of cruel medical experiments by the nazis, operations that resulted in the loss of his fine voice.” After the war, Kulisiewicz compiled lists not only of compositions but also poetry written in the camps but these have yet to be published. He effectively got the ball rolling. Lotoro estimates there are almost 4,000 concentration camp compositions which he likens, in extent, to the spoken testimonies from Holocaust survivors, an enormous project initiated by famed movie director Steven Spielberg.

 

For Lotoro, the task of gathering music scores continues – “there are libraries to be explored, antiquarian shops of various kinds around Europe to visit. It will be necessary (in the long term) to set up a central archive of such music, catalogued and kept under one roof rather than have these scores being kept in a variety of museums and libraries around the world.”

 

Lotoro also makes the important point that with time running out, survivors still able to recall music that does not as yet exist on paper ought to be encouraged to put notes on paper. “For instance, there is an opera – Karel Svenk’s Long Life to Life – that some survivors of Theresienstadt, now living in Israel, still sing by heart. But there is no written score – and we need to notate it soon otherwise it will vanish with the passing of those who can still remember it.”

 

Theresienstadt, near Prague in Czechoslovakia, had originally been built as a garrison town. It had facilities for a population of  7,000. But when the two arch-nazis and chief planners of genocide – Reinard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann –  chose Theresienstadt primarily as a transit camp for Jews en route to the death camps such as Auschwitz, the population grew to 60,000. Among those imprisoned here by the Germans, were Jewish war veterans, some decorated for valour, who had fought in the Prussian Army during World War 1. Their loyalty to Germany in WWI counted for nothing in the camps

 

In this overcrowded place, in terribly oppressive conditions, there was an amazing creative flowering as one work after another poured from the pens of imprisoned musicians: Gideon Klein wrote a fine piano sonata and arranged a set of Czech and Russian folk songs (his death has never been confirmed but he is thought to have perished as a slave labour in a salt mine); Pavel Haas wrote his Piano Sonatas Nos 5, 6 & 7 – and Viktor Ullmann wrote the opera The King of Atlantis.(Johann Marcus, one of Ullmann’s sons, survived and lives permanently in a psychiatric hospital in England).And Hans Krasa wrote a childrens’ opera Brundibar. These works have since become internationally known.

 

One of the blackest days at Theresienstadt was 17 October 1944. Lotoro says that “within the space of a few hours, an entire generation of composers, virtuoso pianists,  philosophers and artists died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz to which they had been deported from Theresienstadt.”

 

Many of these often-transcendentally gifted people were cut down in their prime. Among those slaughtered was the 15-year-old Jiri  Kummermann  who left a String Quartet and a text book of harmony and counterpoint exercises. Another teenager – Petr Ginz – not a musician, has left a deeply moving diary of his experiences; while in Theresienstadt, he founded and edited a camp newspaper before being transported to Auschwitz where he was killed.

 

Lotoro has made it his life’s work to not only rescue, edit and record as much concentration camp music as possible but to interview as many survivors of the period as possible (now very few in number) as well as descendants of murdered musicians.

 

“Karl Berman was a survivor of Auschwitz: he was liberated by American troops. He lost his entire family in the camps”, said Lotoro. “After the war, he continued his vocal studies in Prague and became a celebrated opera singer. I met him in Prague in 1992. He was very old and was to die three years later. It was a very moving experience. The old man gave me a recording he’d made of four songs, settings of Chinese poems that Pavel Haas had composed for him shortly before dying in an Auschwitz gas chamber.”

 

Lotoro added that in Prague, he’d also met Stepan Lucky who had been training as a virtuoso pianist when the war began. “When I met him in 1993, I asked him for his autograph which he gave me after writing it with a shaking hand; it was illegible. The German soldiers deliberately crippled his right hand. So, unable to play the piano, he became a composer instead.”

 

Some musicians who had survived the camps tried to block out their experiences. Lotoro says that when he visited Frantisek Domazlicki and played a piano piece the old man had written in the camps, he became angry as if he wanted no reminders of that terrible time. “Instead, he gave me a copy of a Sonata for trombone drums and piano.

 

“I had a similar reaction when I wrote to Felix Werder in Melbourne asking if he could send me some psalm settings he’d made in the Tatura camp in Australia . ‘I will send them to you but please don’t ask me anything concerning that period. I am very old and tired’”. Werder, who wrote a good deal of avant-garde music in Australia, was music critic for The Age newspaper for many years.

 

In the Warsaw Ghetto, in terrible conditions. Wladyslaw  Szpillman (whose life was made into the Roman Polansky movie The Pianist) composed  his Concertino for piano and orchestra.

 

Although it was the Jews of Europe who, more than any other group, were singled out for murder by the Nazis, there were others, fewer in number, who perished in the camps: gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses such as Eric Frost who composed a hymn in Sachsenhausen which is still sung by Jehovah’s Witnesses congregations.  Polish Catholics imprisoned in Dachau wrote a puppet opera on a Christmas theme. And in a detention camp in Rumania,  Zdenko Karol  Rund  wrote a setting of the Mass called Salve Mater Polonia .

 

Lotoro and his colleagues have been working tirelessly to retrieve, edit, study and perform an immense amount of music. Not all of it is at the highest level of creativity and in style and format ranges from standard classical forms such as sonatas to cabaret and music theatre, music primarily for children, jazz and sacred music. The KZ MUSIK CDs are available on the Musikstrasse label.

 

Copyright 2008 Neville Cohn


150th anniversary of Giacomo Puccini’s birth

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by Neville Cohn

 

Violent sex, rowdy, late-night booze-ups with his card playing mates, driving powerful cars – and expensive motor boats – at breakneck speed as well as composing some of the most loved operas in the repertoire. This was Puccini. But when little Giacomo came into the world in the Italian town of Lucca 150 years ago on  22 December 1858, he was destined for a life as church musician as five generations of Puccinis had been before him in their home town. But the young Giacomo was to achieve much greater things.

 

He wasn’t an attractive personality; he was self-centred in the extreme – and he certainly didn’t lack self-confidence. He’d often say in later life: “I am a mighty hunter of wild fowl, beautiful women and good libretti”.

 

His huge opinion of himself armoured him against many vicissitudes although he was shaken by the negative response of the audience at the premiere of Madame Butterfly which bombed big time. Ever-feisty, he exchanged insults with outraged opera goers who hissed and booed at the first ever airing of that most loved of tear-jerkers. The critics also clobbered it. So, with the sounds of that first night audience’s booing and hissing ringing in his ears, Puccini made some adjustments to the score. And when it was mounted at Brescia shortly afterwards, it was a triumphant success with many arias encored and, in the quaint fashion of the time, the composer coming on stage at the end of each encore to share the applause with the singers. Butterfly’s hold on audiences everywhere has never wavered since.

 

This became a pattern: his operas given the thumbs down by audiences and critics at their first airings but finding overwhelming acceptance in the long term.

 

Paradoxically, his Fanciulla del West  was a stunning success at a glittering first night at New York’s famed Metropolitan Opera with fans and critics alike extolling an opera set in the Wild West and starring Enrico Caruso in his first and only cowboy role. But this opera about a poker game in which the stakes are a man’s honour and a woman’s body has never found a firm and honoured place in either the repertoire or the affections of opera-goers, perhaps because it lacks the rich stream of melody that makes most of his other operas so cherished. Perth opera lovers can experience this rarity at the Maj next year.  

 

To this day, however, productions of La Boheme, Butterfly and Tosca have been licences for printing money. It made a fortune for Puccini (and his publisher Ricordi who bankrolled his genius client until he hit the jackpot)  who would use it to buy big-boys’ toys like souped-up motorboats in which he’d roar around Italian lakes.

 

Puccini seldom needed to wait for inspiration. And when it came, he would drop whatever he was doing – perhaps a noisy drinks party  – go to his room and, with drunken revelry in the background, write arias for his heroines. It was on such an occasion that he repaired to his room at a nearby inn to write the last notes of Mimi’s death scene in La Boheme, noting afterwards  “I had to get up, and while standing there in the middle of the room,  I cried like a child. It was like seeing a daughter die.” Then he went to join his sozzled, carousing mates and hit the turps. 

Boheme was wildly successful and Puccini used some of the proceeds to buy himself a yacht which he called Mimi I – and hundreds of new babies around the world were called Mimi.

 

Puccini was not particularly liked by his fellow composers. Would envy have been part of this? Probably.

 

His operas were sneered at by the likes of Gabriel Faure. That great French composer of some of the finest songs in the repertoire, dismissed La Boheme as “dreadful” and sneered at Puccini’s work in general as “a kind of soup in which every style from every country gets all mixed up.”  Shostakovich said “he wrote marvellous operas but terrible music” – and Stravinsky called Butterfly “treacly violin music”. And an eminent critic called Tosca “a shabby little shocker”    .        

 

But as the money rolled in from opera goers who seemed never to have enough of his music, Puccini laughed all the way to the bank. Before he hit the operatic jackpot, though, Puccini had to put up with the endless complaints of Elvira, first his mistress (she was married at the time and in the strictly Catholic Italy of the time, divorce was not an option) and later, after her husband died, Puccini’s wife. Endlessly, in their early years, she nagged her lover pointing out that Mascagni and Leoncavallo were making fortunes from their respective one-act goldmines – Cavalleria Rusticana  and I  Pagliacci – while he wasn’t. He certainly made up for lost time with Tosca, Butterfly and Boheme which made them wealthy.

 

As she grew older and less glamorous, Elvira became increasingly infuriated by Puccini’s dalliances and accused their domestic servant Doria  Manfredi quite wrongly of having an affair with Giacomo.  Doria was so devastated by these unfounded accusations that she killed herself. Elvira almost landed in jail after Doria’s family had Elvira charged  but Puccini bought off the family with thousands of lire.

 

During his student days, young Giacomo earned some income by playing the organ at church services – and the piano in taverns and brothels. But as he would often say, “early on God touched me with a finger and said ‘write for the theatre and ONLY the theatre’”. There’s no doubt that the Lord gave the young Puccini very good advice because when it came to theatre, his instincts were almost invariably unerring.

 

Unlike many, lesser composers who weren’t fussy about the libretti they set to music, Puccini’s endless searches for perfect texts often prompted fiery encounters between composer and wordsmiths, driving Puccini to distraction and his librettists to prostration. But when the words were to Puccini’s satisfaction, what magic flowed from his pen. His music manuscripts, incidentally, were incredibly untidy and only very few music editors were capable of translating his scrawls into readable notation – and in this there was a parallel with Beethoven’s manuscripts which are fantastically untidy as well.

 

It was throat cancer that killed him. He’d been a heavy smoker most of his life. He endured agonizing medical treatments which precipitated a fatal heart attack, dying before completing Turandot.

 

His legacy lives on in the form of innumerable recordings and regular mountings of his operas th


Obituary Derek Moore Morgan

 

 

 

 

 

Derek Moore Morgan

born: April 1915

died: December 2007    

 

Sea water may have coursed through his veins but teaching was in his genes. For many years music critic for The West Australian, Derek Moore Morgan came from a large Northern Irish family steeped in the educational tradition.

 

An only child, he was born in Forrest  Hall, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne. His father had a prep school in the village and his grandfather, Canon William Moore Morgan, was headmaster of Armagh Royal School.

 

Early showing a gift for music, the young pianist played at local festivals and later  for the northern BBC, as well as winning diplomas from London College of Music in his mid-teens. He graduated B Mus from King’s College, Durham University in 1936. By 1939, he had also earned B Mus and doctoral degrees (for which he composed a symphony) at Trinity College, Dublin.

 

Derek seemed destined to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. But there was a prior calling. When World War II broke out, Derry joined the British Merchant Navy as a radio officer sailing with Atlantic convoys early in the war and later serving on vessels taking coals, not to but from, Newcastle down England’s east coast to London, a dangerous journey with German E-boats constantly on the prowl for prey.

 

This seagoing trait is evident in the generation following Derry. A son, Patrick, joined the Merchant Navy as a cadet when he was 17 – and daughter Cynthia became a WRNS 3rd officer. She was born during an air raid in 1944 to Derry’s first wife Nancy Smith who died young of TB in 1947.

 

After the war, Derry was appointed Director of School Music at Dorking Grammar School and taught there with distinction for 29 years.  

 

By many accounts, Doc (as he was affectionately known to his students), was an inspiring, dynamic teacher. His future wife , novelist and short story writer Barbara Yates Rothwell (who was also to serve as music critic on The West Australian) was at the time a sixth former and choir accompanist, thus able to see his teaching method close up.  She recalled that “no one who sat through his classes would ever forget the sight of Doc standing at the piano, banging out the orchestral parts of some great classic work – Handel’s Messiah and Coronation Anthems, perhaps, or Mozart’s Requiem – bellowing out the bass part in a raucous, slightly off-key voice. Whether his style of teaching was planned or whether it simply emerged from his volatile, vibrant personality is difficult to say.” And  annual Christmas carol services in the local parish church were routinely packed to the doors.

In 1967, however, the cumulative strain of years of shouldering the responsibilities of running Dorking Grammar’s music department on his own and, perhaps, residual stress of war service brought on a serious breakdown.

 

Derry returned to work after convalescing for four months – but it wasn’t the same although there was still the old spirit that had so splendidly inspired his student.

 

Change was on the cards. And when Barbara suggested immigrating to Australia – a daughter had settled in Australia some time before – his response was “Why not?”. They came to Perth in 1974. Derry never returned to the UK.

 

Barbara recalls how, fifty and more years on, letters still arrive at Christmas from grateful students mentioning the joy experienced at those long-ago choral sessions.

 

Those many years teaching in the UK were to prove invaluable in Derry’s work for the Australian Music Examinations Board in Perth where his genial, avuncular manner did much to put nervous candidates at their ease.

 

Although music was his main game, Derry was handy with wood, the evidence of that apparent in the bookshelves he installed in the family home in Yanchep. He’d also occasionally play a round of tennis when he could find an opponent

 

Derry never learned to drive a car and it was Barbara who, in the interests of road safety (as she put it, tongue in cheek), would ferry Derry to and from their Yanchep home. Barbara says “Derry began learning to drive in his 40s. He could do the steering part perfectly well but he thought the road belonged to him so I begged him NOT to drive”. In so doing, she took on a monumental task ferrying Derry to and from concert venues in and near the CBD; it was a 100 kilometre round trip, done countless times over the years.

 

Derry is survived by Barbara, children Cynthia, Patrick, Helen, Keith., Alison and Fiona and grandchildren.

 

At the funeral service, there were recordings, made during years at Dorking Grammar, of Derek conducting extracts from Brahms’ A German Requiem and his own Christmas carol Behold a simple, tender Babe, described by emeritus professor David Tunley as “hauntingly beautiful” and the many reviews he wrote for The West Australian as “invariably informed by fine musicianship“ .

 

Neville Cohn


OBITUARY Lady Kathleen Callaway

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Kathleen Callaway

Born: Dunedin, New Zealand November 1921

Died: Perth 12 July 2007

 

 

 

 

When Kathleen Callaway with husband Frank and their four young children arrived in Perth from New Zealand in 1953, it was the longest journey she had ever undertaken from her native New Zealand. It is most unlikely that she would at that time have anticipated the countless travel miles she would clock up at the side of her husband in the cause of music education.

 

A happy childhood was interrupted in 1929 when her stationmaster father Alexander Allan died, aged only 37 years, and the family returned to Dunedin to live with Kathleen’s maternal grandmother Jessie Shore which allowed Kathleen’s mother to enter the workforce, a crucial need during the Great Depression.

 

Despite difficult times, music was often heard in the Allan household. Little Kathleen  began lessons when she was about 10 years old.  Even in those early days, little Kathleen punched above her weight in competitions and established an enviable reputation as soloist and accompanist.

 

At Otago Girls’ High, Kathleen was accompanist for the school choir and this was a skill which would be honed to an extraordinary level as the years passed. After completing a clerical course at Rossbotham’s Commercial College, she obtained a post at Dunedin’s leading music store – Beggs – later working at Stanton Brothers, stationers.

 

At a musical evening in 1940, Kathleen met her sister Pat’s violin teacher. His name was Frank Callaway. It was the genesis of a 63-year-long partnership.

 

Kathleen and Frank were engaged on 17 November 1940, Kathleen’s 19th birthday. They married in December 1942.

 

June, the Callaways’ first child, was born in April, 1944, Barbara in September 1947, just a fortnight after Frank went abroad for two years’ study. These would have been trying, tiring days for Kathleen who, with her two infants, spent some of the time with her mother. Frank  returned to Dunedin in August, 1949. Allan was born in 1950 and Ross the following year.

 

During this time, Kathleen’s superb mothering instincts came to the fore as a profound and deeply held belief in the importance of family unity. Again and again, friends recall the care and love lavished on family and home. And for all who visited the Callaway home, there was a warm welcome. Emeritus Professor David Tunley recalls that when he came from Sydney to Perth to join UWA’s Department of Music in 1958, he was invited to lunch with the Callaways every day for an entire year. 

 

Physically,  Kathleen was a tiny person.  Professor John Ritchie recalls her “as dainty and delicate” and  “having difficulty reaching the piano pedals. And stretching an octave would have been effortful……..but the artistic and musical results gave no inkling of these purely physiological limitations. Hers was a sensitive response to the demands of the music she played”.  A “treasured memory” of Ritchie is a performance in 1950 of his own Passacaglia (OK)and Fugue (OK)for piano and strings with Kathleen at the keyboard and Frank conducting.

 

While the domestic environment she provided for her family was all-important, Kathleen would dutifully accompany her husband on innumerable journeys around the world necessitated by the demands of high office. Here, she was, in the words of long time family friend Wallace Tate, the ‘perfect consort’, her calm, moderating influence often dissolving tensions that might arise.

 

And of those many journeys shared with Ritchie and his wife Anita, Ritchie recalls with pleasure and admiration innumerable Scrabble games played on long train treks across the world and generously acknowledges the Callaways’  superiority in these word contests. There were frequent meetings of the four in London, too, where the Callaways had the use of Australian pianist Eileen Joyce’s flat.

 

Kathleen’s skill in completing cryptic crossword puzzle was legendary.  As well, she was an outstanding canasta player and a formidable opponent, encouraging less successful players with her usual comment: “It’s only a game”. In rare defeat, she was gracious and accepting.

 

Although family was Kathleen’s highest priority, her contribution in other fields was significant. For ten years, she was organist at St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Nedlands. A profoundly compassionate person, Kathleen found time to work as an off-air counsellor for Nightline, and, as a member of the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital Auxiliary, worked in one of the hospital shops.

 

For over 25 years, Kathleen was accompanist for the UWA Choral Society which was trained and directed by an indefatigable Sir Frank Callaway. Many former choristers  such as Helen Edmonds recall with pleasure Kathleen’s artistry at the keyboard, not least for her extraordinary sightreading skill and an ability to adapt instantly to whatever style of music was being essayed. Beryl Hendry speaks of Kathleen’s warm and giving nature. “She played the organ at our wedding and still remembered the date after 49 years!”  Kathleen was heard, too, as piano soloist in recitals for what was then the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

 

Kathleen was a lifelong cricket enthusiast. Ritchie recalls that “although a fully committed Australian supporter, she was torn over New Zealand cricket, I suspect, out of sympathy because the Black Caps usually got beaten by Australia when it mattered……”

 

Let Ritchie have the last, graceful word: “We know the late Lady Callaway as a mother and musician, as a wife and organizer – a pianist, harpsichordist and organist, a charitable, friendly and loving colleague; a miniature giant”.

 

Lady Callaway is survived by children June, Barbara, Allan and Ross, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

 

Neville Cohn

 


2005 – Music in Perth


An overview


reviewed by Neville Cohn

In one of the best ever years for serious music in Perth, it was the W.A.Symphony Orchestra which, towards the end of 2005, reached heights never before attained. Two programs conducted by Russian maestro Alexander Lazarev produced sensational interpretations, notably of Shostakovich’s Tenth. Soon after, we heard Charles Dutoit take the WASO through a magnificent reading of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This was incontrovertible evidence that, provided the right person is on the podium, the WASO is capable of stunning interpretations. Earlier in the year, Vladimir Verbitsky led the orchestra through an at-times electrifying account of Prokofiev’s cantata Alexander Nevsky.

Of a raft of soloists with the WASO, it was Shlomo Mintz above all who scaled the heights in Brahms’ Violin Concerto – and Allan Meyer was near-sublime in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Russian master pianist Nicolai Demidenko did wonders in Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini.

There was some exceptionally rewarding chamber music on offer, notably by the Australian String Quartet, wondrously eloquent in Bartok’s Fourth but their collaboration with cellist Li-Wei in Schubert’s Quintet in C was one of the year’s dullest offerings. The Macquarie Trio reached for the stars in Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor – and the visiting Kronos Quartet did not need visual features (which were often intrusively annoying) to give evidence of magnificently honed ensemble skills.

Of piano recitals, far and away the most eccentric was by Geoffrey Tozer whose account of a Schubert sonata was bizzarely erratic. Roger Woodward’s all-Chopin recital ranged from the unfortunate to the profoundly musical. And Larry Sitsky, now in his seventies, brought youthful ardour to hitherto neglected virtuoso works of Anton Rubinstein. Scottish pianist Steven Osborne was magnificent in Mozart’s Piano Concerto K414 with the ACO but wasted his time and ours in Britten’s vulgar, cheap and noisy Young Apollo.

There was a deal of new music, with pianist Emily Green-Armytage giving a probing account of Roger Smalley’s Three Studies in Black and White. Darryl Poulsen gave the first performance of Smalley’s Lament with the composer contributing discreetly on percussion at a concert to raise funds for tsunami victims. At the Luna Cinema, Evan Kennea conducted Louis Andriessen’s fascinatingly intricate score for Peter Greenaway’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart – and James Ledger’s Line Drawing, a concerto for recorders and strings, was given a successful premiere at the Art Gallery of W.A. with Genevieve Lacey as soloist. Another remarkable new work – Georges Lentz’s Caeli Enarrant – was presented by the Australian Quartet in ensemble with percussionists positioned at four points of the Concert Hall.

Emeritus Professor David Tunley’s 75th birthday was marked by a mainly-Tunley program at the Octagon. Few Perth-based musicians have served the arts with such distinction both here and abroad. But why are so few of Tunley’s often delightful works on CD? They certainly deserve to be.

A packed Callaway Auditorium heard Stephanie Coleman and Jangoo Chapkhana in a charm-laden piano duet recital of French music.

Whether John Adams’ introverted and melancholic On the Transmigration of Souls for orchestra and chorus will survive on its own merits remains to be seen. For the present, its powerful associations with 9/11, which inspired it, guarantees it a place in orchestral programs.

Among singers, laurels to Kiwi bass Peter Whelan whose account of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death for PIAF set new standards for vocal excellence. Charlotte Hellekant made a positive impression as Carmen in Bizet’s timeless masterpiece – and Rachelle Durkin, fresh from vocal experience in the USA, sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni as if the part had been written for her. Andrew Foote repeated his success as Papageno in Mozart’s Magic Flute in Opera in the Park.

Fiona Campbell’s glorious mezzo soprano voice was thrilling in two cantatas by Monteclair as well as Bach’s St Matthew Passion, also memorable for beautifully considered violin obbligati from Paul Wright. The impact of this performance of Bach’s Passion was all the greater as a result of Lindy Hume’s discreet and invariably tasteful theatrical touches.

Richard Tognetti’s skill as an arranger has greatly enriched the repertoire for chamber orchestra – but his transcription for solo cello and strings of Franck’s superb Sonata in A for violin and piano was a major miscalculation. Lacking that adversarial quality that is the essence of the original, it bombed despite the eloquence of cellist extraordinaire Pieter Wispelwey. Another cellist – Noeleen Wright – made an all-too-rare appearance in an all-Beethoven program. Partnered at the fortepiano by Cecilia Sun, Wright’s playing bristled with authority and intensity of emotion. Why is this exceptional musician so rarely heard in recital? Steven Isserlis dazzled in Britten’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No 3; it was an exercise in perfection.

Andrew Fisenden, a young wizard on drum kit, was frankly thrilling in ensemble with Defying Gravity.

Perth’s music life became the poorer for the passing in April of Marcia Harrison, noted music historian and matriarch of a family that has made an enormous contribution to the city’s music life. Another departure from the scene was flamenco singer Jose Maria Gonzalez.

Copyright 2005 Neville Cohn