In a special performance featuring acclaimed American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in her Melbourne debut, the MSO Ryman Health Care Spring Gala offers a stirring reminder of music’s restorative power to uplift the spirits and serve as a genuine tonic for modern mental wellbeing. Bringing together Rossini, Berlioz and Respighi in a sequence as theatrically vivid as it is musically nourishing, the gala enraptures with colour, drama and emotional contrast.

Opening with Rossini’s William Tell Overture – that familiar multi-sectioned showpiece composed in 1829 for the last of the composer’s 39 operas – the MSO delivers a superb reading with astutely contoured phrasing and attention to detail under Chief Conductor Jaime Martín.

Chief Conductor Jaime Martín and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Laura Manariti

Fine-grained playing from the cellos glows in the delicate ‘Dawn’ introduction, with principal cellist David Berlin providing especially sensitive highlights. The subsequent ‘Storm’ section erupts with thrilling precision: brass injections are decisive, timpani strikes threatening, and the strings maintain clarity at full throttle, building to the type of magnificent crescendo Rossini was famed for.

In the pastoral calm...