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. 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. The five movements share and rework their material. In the opening Quasi una fantasia the soloist is shadowed by orchestral clarinets placed far left and right, in what Ledger calls “a dark canonic shimmer”. … Continue reading Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony (West Australian Symphony Orchestra)