Three minutes, a brass section and a battery of percussion. Aaron Copland needed nothing more for Fanfare for the Common Man, and in the spacious acoustic of UWA’s Winthrop Hall WASO’s brass and percussion rang out nobly.

Timpani and bass drum strike. A lone trumpet answers. The rest of the brass gather round it in open fourths. Copland’s 1942 wartime commission is as concise as a Roman monumental inscription, each letter cut deep enough to be read from the far end of the forum.

It made an arresting opener, and an object lesson in how little a composer needs for maximum dramatic effect.

Asher Fisch conducts the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s Rachmaninov Second Symphony. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Australian composer James Ledger’s Clarinet Concerto, commissioned for WASO by Geoff Stearn and here receiving its world premiere, works from the other end. In his program note Ledger says his music has for some time been “moving away from pitch and harmonic centred music towards colour and gesture”. He found in the clarinet, with its “astonishing array of extended techniques”, the ideal vehicle.