It’s been a year since Limelight last spoke to Sydney Youth Orchestras Chief Conductor Stanley Dodds. He has a lot to talk about.

“My life has changed completely, actually,” he says. “Quite literally, something came up out of the blue.”

We’re talking ahead of Dodds’ next project for The Sydney Youth Orchestra, a massive undertaking that will see an expanded SYO ensemble play one of great modernist masterworks – Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – in a one-off concert performed in the latest addition to Sydney’s post-industrial arts infrastructure, the White Bay Power Station.

That in itself is a “crazy project”, says Dodds. But more on that later. He has been working another one, too – building a brand new orchestra in a regional town in southern Poland.

Stanley Dodds. Photo courtesy Sydney Youth Orchestra

“I got a phone call from a friend of mine about a new, purpose-built concert all in a town called Bielsko-Biała that had been built by a private company, a real estate company,” says Dodds. “Had I ever heard of it?”

At that stage, Dodds hadn’t. Bielsko-Biała, population approximately 168,000 (making it Poland’s 22nd largest city), isn’t known for...