One could not have imagined a more triumphant homecoming of sorts for WASO than this 2025 season opening concert, which one enthusiastic audience member described on the night as akin to a musical orgasm.

For in returning to the University of Western Australia’s historic, architecturally eclectic 1930s Winthrop Hall, the orchestra not only acknowledged its own past (it called the Hall home from 1967 to 1972) but (re)created that extraordinary sense of historical legacy, festive excitement and visceral intimacy usually only possible in smaller, historic venues. And usually reserved for a New Year’s Concert.

Full house at Winthrop Hall for WASO’s Beethoven’s Fifth. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Moreover, WASO opened the concert with James Ledger’s scintillating The Light Fantastic, a work specially commissioned to mark the occasion, before following it with two classics of the orchestral repertoire whose expressive power and rigorous use of motivic construction and transformation are legendary: Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Beethoven’s Symphony No.5.

Thus was past, present and future, identity, reinvention and metamorphosis also confidently signalled as the orchestra enters a period of adaptation to new circumstances while its usual performing venue, the...