Saturday night’s performance by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was directed by Dutchman Otto Tausk in a programme comprising Stravinsky’s rarely performed Scherzo fantasique, Op. 3 (1908), Debussy’s orchestral masterpiece La Mer (1903-05) and the first Piano Concerto by Brahms in D minor, Op. 15 (1858) with Palestinian-Israeli Saleem Ashkar as soloist.

The Stravinsky is an early work inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s essay La Vie des Abeilles (The Life of the Bee) written in 1901. The work is structured in three parts describing a day in the life of a hive of bees. The first and last sections give the workaday impression of an industrious beehive while the central slow section evocatively depicts the nuptial flight as the queen bee leads her mate towards his demise. Sergei Diaghilev attended the first performance and was so impressed by the young composer’s work that the now famous serious of commissions for the Ballets Russes followed soon afterwards.

This was the MSO’s first performance of the work and it was well carried. The outer movement’s moto perpetuum buzzed away in strings with intricate interjections from brass and woodwind expertly passed across the orchestra. The slower section was introduced by a brief but lovely viola solo (Christopher...