In a program note on her 2016 work The Saqqara Bird, Australian composer Melody Eötvös writes that she was inspired by theories about the bird-shaped sycamore-wood artefact excavated at Saqqara in 1898 to create a tapestry of “the mechanical, the living and the ancient becoming new again.” The result is, apparently, atypical for her: a work grounded in rhythmic and harmonic stability, with generative repetition producing a “Pinocchio-like metamorphosis.”

It makes a compelling overture, The Saqqara Bird metaphorically taking flight as German conductor Anja Bihlmaier – making her WASO debut – and the orchestra catch the score’s mechanistic and organic qualities with precision and warmth.

The stage is set for American violinist Benjamin Beilman – no stranger to WASO audiences – to join Bihlmaier and the orchestra for a fine account of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. Across its three linked movements, Beilman uses a generous expressive palette with discernment. This is, after all, Mendelssohn: less combat than conversation, a quality shared with Schumann’s Cello Concerto, heard from soloist Ivan Karizna and WASO the week before.

Benjamin Beilman and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Beilman moves effortlessly from the opening movement’s ambiguous vocalics and marvellous cadenza through a serene C major cantabile to a sparkling, elfin finale, while Bihlmaier and WASO project a classically proportioned sound picture enlivened by romantic burrs. Beilman’s encore –  Bach’s Gavotte en rondeau from the E major Partita for solo violin – could not be more apposite, given Mendelssohn’s love of his Baroque predecessor, or better played.

Bihlmaier’s 2024 Sydney Symphony debut was praised in this publication for having “brought the house down.” No surprise, given her accounts here not only of the Eötvös and Mendelssohn but of the extraordinary performance that follows interval.

Composed in 1937 and triumphantly premiered that year, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor was presented by the press as “A Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to just criticism.” Shostakovich, however, preferred to describe it as tracing “the development of the individual,” lyrical throughout, with the finale resolving earlier tension “on a joyous, optimistic note.”

Anja Bihlmaier and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Under Bihlmaier, the performance’s muscular clarity is clear from the first bars: canonic string entries snap into relief, leaping sixths and narrowing thirds shaped with architectural precision. The lyrical violin line sits cleanly above, while the development’s demonic march builds through pressure rather than volume. Hammered brass chords land with Thor-like power, and the closing celesta figures remain exposed and unresolved.

The Allegretto’s waltz-grotesquerie is just as unsentimental: brass bite rather than blare, irony trumps charm, and the trio’s lyricism never warms into sentiment.

In the brassless Largo, divided strings balance with chamber-like transparency, the Vozrozhdenie-derived opening emerging as bare soliloquy. Mahlerian and liturgical echoes register without indulgence, while two anguished swells are shaped with restraint, the clarity sharpening the bleakness.

The finale’s martial opening has bite, its folk-inflected passages held in firm relief, and the D minor-to-D major climax feels inevitable. In the coda, those countless quaver repetitions become a controlled, almost mechanical insistence beneath the brass’s triumph, leaving the ending suspended between coercion and jubilation.