Pietari Inkinen shows “his impressive grasp of the big musical picture”

“It is as if Prokofiev is telling his friend Rostropovich “show us what you’ve got” in some passages, and this was a remarkable performance with Gerhardt totally in sync with Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, another favourite with Australian audiences, especially after his magnificent survey of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Melbourne for Opera Australia in 2016.
He showed his impressive grasp of the big musical picture in the second half with an outstanding performance of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, written at the time of his disastrous marriage to Antoninya Milyukova and which shocked his patron Nadezhda von Meck with its “profound, terrifying despair”.
The orchestra was in magnificent form, with Inkinen, ever the man for the big moment, shaping the massive first movement, with its dramatic momentum tempered with the delicate brightness of the winds, into a cohesive whole. There were too many fine solo moments throughout the four movements to pick out any for special mention.
If the second half began with a fateful blaze of brass the evening also started with a fanfare, a new work by former SSO composer-in-residence Liza Lim as part of the orchestra’s long running project commissioning 50 new Australian works.
Salutations to the Shells refers to the Indigenous seashell monuments – some as high as 12m high – that lined the shores and estuaries of Port Jackson and which were burnt and used in the buildings of the Rocks by the early colonists.
Over its 10 minutes Lim’s powerful work juxtaposes the brass and snare drums of the military with an oceanic sway and a subtle sense of loss at the destruction of an ancient Indigenous city.
Some of the opening passages with horns, trumpets and trombones had a Sibelius-like quality, while sliding figures and the use of two vibraphones and a range of percussion effects all added to the canvas of textures and sounds.”
Steve Moffatt, Limelight Magazine