There’s nothing new about symphony orchestras performing to movies on the big screen as a way of reaching a wider audience, but what was innovative about the Sydney Symphony’s concert featuring Gustav Holst’s The Planets was that the vision was synchronised to the live music – not the other way round.

Normally, the conductor – in this case the SSO’s Conductor in Residence, Benjamin Northey – leads with one eye on the screen and the other on the score, trying to keep the musicians perfectly in time with what we are watching.

But Dutch cinematographer and former French horn player Lucas van Woerkum and his company Symphonic Cinema made Loss, starring British film royalty Emma Thompson and Greg Wise, so that he could sit on stage during live performances by five orchestras around the world and adjust the speed of the images on a touchpad as the music was played.

The result, as concertgoers discovered across these three performances, was a far more cohesive experience, with Northey able to give a freer, more naturally nuanced reading while the audience absorbed a silent film of great beauty about grief, the possibility of an afterlife and the experience of losing a partner.

Benjamin Northey and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Photo © Jay Patel.

The musical performance sparkled, as expected from one of the finest orchestras in the world today, but it was given an extra layer of emotion and depth by van Woerkum’s scenes, superbly tailored to the seven movements in Holst’s suite, telling the story of a painter and her photographer husband.

Part dance, part intensely expressive mime, its emotional momentum was driven entirely by the couple’s facial expressions and physicality, the abandoned clothes and objects in their home and, of course, the music. Van Woerkum drew on a remark by Holst’s daughter, Imogen, that the suite has little to do with astronomy or astrology, but instead represents the “progression of the human soul”.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Lucas van Workum’s film, Loss. Photo © Jay Patel.

Earlier in the concert came a bravura world premiere performance by SSO stalwart Rebecca Lagos of Nigel Westlake’s percussion concerto When the Clock Strikes Me, a “cherry-picked” and slimmed-down revision of the original work written for Lagos and first performed 20 years ago.

The front of the stage was packed with an eye-watering array of metal and wooden instruments for banging, hammering and tinkling. Lagos didn’t quite have the kitchen sink, but she did have an impressive collection of pots and pans sourced from a catering shop – she had tried car hubcaps, but they took up too much space.

The set-up of this percussive orchestra took weeks of collaboration between Westlake and Lagos to refine. A ticking clock motif runs throughout the three movements as Lagos, with mesmerising choreography, moved between three “nests” of instruments, including xylophone, marimba and an array of drums, blocks, gongs and cymbals.

The orchestral scoring was cleverly integrated with the soloist’s dazzling virtuosity and Lagos’s obvious joy in striking these inanimate objects.