Llewellyn Hall, ANU, Canberra
May 2, 2018

In his debut outing with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, conductor Johannes Fritzsch quickly established a strong rapport. The orchestra seemed to enjoy playing under his baton, such was their freshness and vitality, made more so by an imaginative program, full of contrasts.

The concert started late because concertmaster, Barbara Jane Gilby, was caught up in a traffic jam on an arterial road from which, once committed, there is little chance of escape. She arrived on stage for the tune-up, wiping her brow. So, the first piece, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis probably was as calming for her as it was the audience.

Scored for large and small string orchestras, and a string quartet, this piece, also known as the Tallis Fantasia bridges 350 years, with Vaughan Williams arranging the third of eight hymn tunes Thomas Tallis wrote around 1567.

Tallis’s hymn would have been quite the strident piece, drawing as it did on Psalm 2 (“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”). But Vaughan Williams took the melody and turned it into a gentle, expressive piece with echo and organ effects, pizzicato punctuations, solo and sectional...