Sydney Symphony, Sydney Opera House

Lyrical lines: Matthew Wilkie

Contrary to its name, the Sydney Opera House is really more of an orchestral hall, and last week the city’s celebrated arts facility got rather more of a symphonic workout than usual. Right before the second edition of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra began a weeklong residency heavy in contemporary music, the Sydney-based Australian Chamber Orchestra returned home with its national tour programme: a line-up of 20th-century repertory curated and introduced by the US music writer Alex Ross. Not to be left out, the city’s flagship orchestra launched the first of the season’s Meet the Music concerts, a youth-orientated series devoted to new and rarely played repertoire.

It was probably intentional but what the Sydney Symphony’s listeners got was a whirlwind tour of historical musical styles, from the Classical and Romantic eras up to the music of today. Conductor Hans Graf opened with Mozart’s Symphony No 34, a suitably buoyant three-movement piece that, if not quite a top-tier symphony, at least made a respectable overture.

After the interval, Graf deftly drew a musical through-line between Stravinsky’s Ode – Elegiacal Chant in Three Parts and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 2, linking the cosmopolitan Russianness of both composers in spite of their different eras.

The highlight, if not the key reason for the concert, was the world premiere of Outposts, a concerto for the symphony’s principal bassoonist Matthew Wilkie by James Ledger, composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne.

For a symphonic instrumentalist not used to the spotlight, Wilkie admirably rose to the challenge, though, if the truth be told, there was little standing musically in his way. Ledger had superbly kept the strings and winds in their extreme high and low registers, reserving the middle range for Wilkie’s smooth, lyrical lines, the only competition in the middle register being plucked sonorities from the piano, harp and strings.

Moving through its four sections – one hesitates to call them movements, as there was no discernible break – Ledger’s Outposts was, like the rest of the evening, thoroughly listenable and not terribly rigorous. The latest instance of Sydney Symphony’s tradition of commissioning solo works from Australian composers, it remains a highly personalised contribution to the bassoon repertory. As the composer and radio announcer Andrew Ford told audiences from the stage, Outposts’ musical exchange between the soloist and the contrabassoon had an extramusical inspiration: Noriko Shimada, the orchestra’s contrabassoonist, happens to be Wilkie’s wife.

Sydney Symphony