Word: sso
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...Southern Hemisphere," the Australian orchestra's bass-heavy Sydney sound was let loose in the more rarefied acoustics of halls in Tokyo and Osaka. "The technique in Japan is really polished, highly trained, actually perfect?no mistakes," says Tokyo-raised, Sydney-based contrabassoonist Noriko Shimada. "I like the SSO because you do play...
...Olding. As a boy, the Japanese prince was sent on holiday to Victoria's Port Phillip Bay because the imperial household considered Australia "in many ways the opposite of Japan." And 32 years later, music has brought the two cultures together again. "If you want to impress him," says SSO artistic operations director Wolfgang Fink, "bring music. He's certainly not so interested in Australian Rules...
...This week sees the Sydney Opera House world premiere of Lim's new work for didgeridoo, flute and orchestra, and the SSO may never sound the same again. The Perth-born composer was interested in how Barton could reconfigure the symphonic frequencies of the orchestra, and The Compass is about "tilting the horizon point," she says. "In a way, the didgeridoo collects all the low instruments around it." The piece also brings Barton back to his roots. He begins with a chant in his native Kalkadunga tongue, since "the voice is absolutely the heart of what the didgeridoo's about...
...that's a little like adding a pyramid to the Louvre. For the piece, Lim extrapolates an Arabic inflection she detects in Mahler's expansive final symphony - "it's like the colors of that fabulous world," she says, "but a different twist - looking at it sideways." For her next SSO work in 2006, Lim hopes to reconfigure the orchestra's sound with a didgeridoo. "That has been one of my projects as a composer," she says, "to have that cross-fertilization between different cultures of music...
Gelmetti likens conducting to erecting a cathedral of sound. "With a cathedral, you must have the right proportions, the right balance," he says. Already he's begun tinkering with the SSO's architecture. Building from the foundations up, he'd like to hold master classes - as he does each summer at Siena's Accademia Chigiana - with young Australian conductors, to fill the ranks left by expat stars Simone Young and Sir Charles Mackerras. "We have a fantastic orchestra, fantastic soloists, good composers - why we have not conductors?" he asks with a rhetorical flourish...