The first of the TSO’s 6pm series of innovative programs kicks off with host and viola player Will Newbery’s customary informative and fun introductions.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Battalia (1673) depicts soldiers preparing for battle, carousing, fighting, and finally lamenting their losses. Scored for strings and continuo, it is played with conductor Eivind Aadland’s expected vivacity and attention to dynamic detail, including commendably restrained vibrato.

The sheer boldness of invention and experimentation is amazing for this musical era; prime examples being the use of dissonance in the second movement allegro, and the basses using paper covering the strings and then struck to suggest the sounds of fife and drum.

Eivind Aadland and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Photo supplied

Australian composer Harry Sdraulig (born 1992) composed his piccolo concerto for Lloyd Hudson and the TSO in 2019, when it was premiered by these artists conducted by Elena Schwarz in September of that year.

The story follows the legendary Greek myth of Icarus who flies too close to the sun only to fall to his death; the work is in five continuous short movements – I Labyrinth; II Invention; III Flight; IV Plunge and V Epilogue. It employs rich harmonies and powerful large-scale orchestral textures while offering challenging writing for the piccolo soloist, at one point before Icarus’s fateful plunge, demanding the highest note achievable on the instrument.

Hudson plays superbly and the orchestra and conductor deliver first-class results. Sdraulig is on hand to take a deserved bow for this attractive piece.

The concert concludes with a sunny, elegant rendition of Schubert’s delightful Mozartian Symphony No. 5 in B flat, D485. It is given with rhythmic energy in the allegros, with freshness, warmth and direct unmannered phrasing elsewhere.