“Cinematic” can refer to music written for film, used in film or evoking in the listener’s imagination filmic images projected onto the mind’s screen.

All three elements were present and correct in this highly enjoyable Friday night WASO concert, Cinematic: Epic soundtracks of the silver screen, which also rang a diverting change on the overture/concerto/symphony format.

Benjamin Northey conducts Cinematic for West Australian Symphony Orchestra, 2022. Photo © Rebecca Mansell

Nigel Westlake’s suite for orchestra Flying Dream features music from his score for the movie Paper Planes.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto borrows themes from his scores for Another Dawn, Anthony Adverse, The Prince and the Pauper and other films. More recently, it was used in the latest season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

The opening section of Richard Strauss’s Nietzsche-inspired tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) was famously used in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m not sure “epic” correctly describes either the Westlake or Korngold pieces (the Strauss, for sure), but “ekphrastic” doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily.

Yet these two works paint such marvellous pictures, especially with artists of the calibre of Australian conductor Benjamin Northey, Latvian...