Programming a concert is like curating an exhibition: you need enough similarities and enough differences to make it cohere and jolt at the same time. This Friday night WASO concert ticked all the boxes. And more besides.

Stravinsky’s suite from the Diaghilev-commissioned 1920 ballet Pulcinella is a delightful masterpiece of Baroque pastiche, appropriating the music of Pergolesi and his contemporaries and breathing new life into old forms. Schwarz and WASO added a weightier 20th century retro quality to the mix, expertly presaging the Shostakovich later in the program. A thrilling opening gambit.

Chinese-Australian cellist Li-Wei Qin is as suave and fluent a cellist as one could wish for in music such as Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major, written sometime during the 1760s and therefore still employing Baroque hacks like the ritornello form so favoured by Vivaldi.

On this occasion, his seemingly effortless passagework and long-breathed lyricism was matched by a deeply sensitive musicianship in the encore soliloquy, Giovanni Sollima’s haunting, sometimes frenetic, Alone.

Li-Wei Qin and the WASO. Photo © Linda Dunjey

Speaking of freneticism and solitude, the second half of the program opened with Sydney composer Holly Harrison’s 2022...