This Friday night concert, featuring WASO’s first-ever Associate Conductor, Jen Winley, and WASO Associate Principal Trumpet Jenna Smith, appropriately brought together two (mostly) Orientalist musical fantasies in which women are the chief protagonists.

Hummel’s popular Trumpet Concerto was the interloper, an intermezzo separating Mel Bonis’ Trois Femmes de légende from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade.

Scheherazade: Jenna Smith (trumpet), conductor Jen Winley and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Daniel James Grant

The name Mélanie Hélène Bonis (1858-1937) was as new to me as her music. Her Trois Femmes de légende comprise three musical portraits of three women from history and legend: Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatra. The music is romantic, at times impressionistic, the latter two portraits embellished with “exotic” melodies, the orchestration using the harp especially to good effect. I wasn’t however as moved as I’d hope to have been, despite a compelling argument mounted by Winley and WASO.

Following a reduction in orchestral forces, Winley returned to the stage accompanied by Jenna Smith, trumpet in hand.

The first entry of the trumpet following the orchestral introduction always takes one by surprise, the sheer volume and brightness of the sound in sharp...