Source : PERTHNOW NEWS
Forget fossil fuels and iron ore, some of Australia’s most successful global exports are actually virtuosic classical musicians.
Sydney’s Tahlia Petrosian and Adelaide-born Daniel Dodds are two top-flight string musicians among those returning Down Under to play with the Australian World Orchestra.
The outfit brings together Australian musicians annually from more than 50 of the world’s leading ensembles and orchestras, for concerts that usually sell out.
There’s nothing quite like it in any other country according to Dodds, who is the artistic director of one of Europe’s foremost chamber orchestras, Switzerland’s Festival Strings Lucerne.
With a 1717 Stradivarius in his hand luggage, the violinist will travel straight from a Friday evening concert, to arrive in Australia Sunday morning.
Rehearsals for the world orchestra start later that same day and the first concert is scheduled for Melbourne on Wednesday.
“You’ve got jet lag, you have trouble sleeping and there’s the ecstatic joy of being together with everybody, it’s very intense,” Dodds told AAP.
“Audiences can definitely sense this is a special project … this is a showcase of Australia’s talent in the classical music scene.”
The orchestra will perform a three part program in Sydney and Melbourne, including Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka and Shostakovich’s post-war Symphony No.10.
The concerts will also feature the world premiere of Australian composer Jonathan Mills’ Songs for the Stranger, with tenor Michael Petruccelli.
The work expands on Mills’ lauded opera Eucalyptus, based on the novel by Murray Bail, with two new pieces composed especially for these concerts.
The orchestra was co-founded by conductor and artistic director Alexander Briger in 2011 and has since has grown into a network of more than 250 musicians.
Tahlia Petrosian is also among them, a violist regarded as one of classical music’s leading innovators – something she credits to an Australian outlook.
The former lawyer joined the world’s oldest public symphony orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchester in Leipzig, in 2012.
“I was very attracted to the idea that music could take me anywhere and it was a great way to make friends in all different countries from different cultures,” she said.
A few years after joining, she launched Klassik Underground, a series of informal shows in an underground club venue, featuring soloists who had just stepped offstage at the Gewandhaus.
This was seen as shocking by some in her traditional orchestra but it brought in new audiences – and brought classical performance into the age of social media.
“I was uninhibited by the fact it may be upsetting the boat to do something like this because the Australian attitude is, ‘Well, let’s just give it a go,'” she told AAP.
Australians can play a leading role in the classical music scene precisely because they lack the constraints of European traditions, said Petrosian.
“We’re from the other end of the planet and we don’t have the rich tradition of countries like Germany and Austria but we have a lot of other things to offer,” she said.
Australian World Orchestra performs at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall August 19 and Sydney Opera House August 20.
