The Willoughby Symphony Orchestra Plays at Sydney’s Newest Concert Hall, by Andrew Miller


The Concourse, the new culture house, showing Warren Langley's fluorescent public art work. Photo: Alan Miller.

The Concourse, Chatswood, Sydney: 7 October, 2011
repeated 9 October 2011

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B minor, Opus 23

Alexey Yemtsov - piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125

Celeste Lazarenko - soprano
Anna Yun - mezzo-soprano
Warren Fisher - tenor
James Olds - bass-baritone

Willoughby Symphony Choir
Sarah Penicka-Smith - choir master

Willoughby Symphony Orchestra
Nicholas Milton - conductor

The Willoughby Symphony, founded in 1965 and based in Sydney's northern suburbs, played the first concert in their new hall. It is an exciting occasion to christen a new concert hall and I marvel at it all the more that it was built in Sydney's North Shore where new building is almost exclusively in the form of hideous apartment blocks which have destroyed many of the area's old gardens and once contiguous tree canopy. The 1000-seat hall is part of a whole culture house called The Concourse, which also has a 500-seat theatre, some impressive-sounding rehearsal space and the new home of the area's borrowing library. Willoughby Council deserves credit for pulling this off when the New South Wales state government one level up cannot manage anything like it for Barangaroo, right next to Sydney's downtown, let alone the second, Frank Gehry-designed opera house that's begging to be built there. But I mustn't be negative; this isn't the occasion.

Read the full review
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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